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NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL HISTORY OF AMER- 
ICA. With Bibliographical and Descriptive Essays on 
its Historical Sources and Authorities. Profusely illus- 
trated with portraits, maps, facsimiles, etc. Edited by 
Justin WiNsoR, Librarian of Harvard University, with 
the cooperation of a Committee from the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, and with the aid of other learned 
Societies, in eight royal 8vo volumes. Each volume, 
net, $5.50; sheep, 7iet, $6.50; half morocco, net, $7.50. 
(Sold only by subscription for ike entire set.) 

READER'S HANDBOOK OF THE AMERICAN REV- 
OLUTION. i6mo, $1.25. 

WAS SHAKESPEARE SHAPLEIGH? i6mo, rubri- 
cated parcliment paper, 75 cents. 

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, atid how he received and 
imparted the Spirit of Discovery. With portraits and 
maps. 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. 

CARTIER TO FRONTENAC. A Study of Geographical 
Discovery in the interior of North America, in its his- 
torical relations, 1534-1700. With full cartographical 
Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, gilt 
top, f 4.00. 

THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. The Struggle in .America be- 
tween England and France, 1697-1763. With full car- 
tographical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 
Svo, gilt top, J4.00. 

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT: The Struggle for the 
Trans-Ailepiheny Region, 1763-1797. With full carto- 
graphical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 
Svo, $4.00. ' 

HOUr.HTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
Boston and New York. 



Cf)e ^Mesttoarli ^o\)ement 




THE COLONIES AND THE 
REPUBLIC 

WEST OF THE ALLEGHANIES 
1 763-1 798 



WITH- FULL CARTOGRAPHICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES 



i/ 



JUSTIN WINSOR 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1897 




NOV S2 1897 






Copyright, 1897, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



<^ '^i" 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotypcd and Printed by II. 0. Uoughton & Company. 



Sir HENEY W. DYKE ACLAND, Bart., 

K. C. B., D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S., 
Honorary Physician to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. 



My dear Sir Henry, — 

When a few clays ago at the Bodleian you addressed a party of sixty 
American librarians, you showed what I have long known, that you 
have a kind appreciation of my countrymen, with some of whom your 
friendship has lasted from the time when you accompanied the l*riiice 
of Wales to the States in 1860. 

You have since then traversed our land on other visits, during which 
you have evinced to me your interest in our history, particularly when 
some years ago we together looked over the ground hallowed by the 
devotion of Lady Hai'riet Acland. 

I therefore like to connect your name with this book, which is a story 
of how much of our territorial integrity we owe to British forbearance, 
when the false-hearted diplomacy of France and Spain would have 
despoiled us. 

Ever your friend. 




Great Malvern, Worcestershire, 

August S, 18'J7. 



CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

An Introductory Survey 1 

CHAPTER II. 

The Property Line, 1763-1764 4 

Illustrations : Guy Johnson's Map of the Fort Stanwix Line, 
15 ; Hutchins's Map of the Indiana Grant, 17 ; Guy Johnson's 
Map of the Country of the Six Nations, 18, 19. 

CHAPTER III. 

Louisiana, Florida, and the Illinois Country, 1763-1768 . . 22 
Illustrations : Hutchins's Map of the American Bottom, 27 ; 
Country of the Southern Indians (1762), 31 ; Evans and Pow- 
nall's Map of the Northwest, 39. 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Kentucky Region, 1767-1774 43 

Illustrations : Portrait of Daniel Boone, 45 ; View of Pitts- 
burg, 51 ; Kitcliin's Map of Pennsylvania, 54, 55. 

CHAPTER V. 

The Quebec Bill and the Dunmore War, 1774 63 

Illustration : Cr^vecoeur's Map of the Scioto Valley, 67. 

CHAPTER VI. 

South of the Ohio, 1769-1776 77 

Illustrations : Boonesborough Fort, 83 ; Map of Colonel An- 
drew Williamson's Campaign in the Cherokee Country, 94, 95o 



vi CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 

CHAPTER A^II. 

The Fortunes of the Mississippi, 1766-1777 101 

Illustrations : Portrait of Jonathan Carver, 102 ; Carver's Map 
of his Proposed Colonies, 105 ; Map of the Vicinity of New 
Orleans (1778), 109. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

George Rogers Clark, Arbiter and Suppliant, 1776-1779 . . 116 
Illustration : Map of the Rapids of the Ohio, 119. 

CHAPTER IX. 
The Sinister Purposes of France, 1774-1779 144 

CHAPTER X. 

A Year of Suspense, 1780 166 

Illustration : Fortifications of St. Louis, 172, 173. 

CHAPTER XI. 

East and West, 1781 188 

Illustration : ]\Iap of the Disputed Boundaries of Penusylvauia 
and Virginia, 197. 

CHAPTER XII. 

Peace, 1782 203 

Illustrations : Bonne's Map of the Thirteen United States, 
bounded by the Allcghanies, 211 ; Dunn's Map of the Source 
of the Mississippi (1776), 214 ; Carver's Map of the Source of 
the Mississippi, 215. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

The Insecurity of the Northwest, 1783-1787 225 

Illustrations : Imlay's :\Iap of Kentucky, 249 ; Washington's 
Sketcli of the Potomac Divide, 253 ; Hockewelder's MS. Map 
of the IMuskingnni and Cuyahoga Valleys, 255 ; Cr^vecccnr's 
Map of tlic Western Country, with the Divisions under Jeffer- 
son's Ordinance, 259 ; View of Fort Mcintosh, 269. 



CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

The Northwest Occupied, 178G-1790 280 

Illustrations : Map of the Ohio Company's Purchase by Collot, 
291 ; View of Fort Harmar, 293 ; Crevecceur's Map of the 
Ohio Country, 294, 295 ; Chart of the Ohio River, 297 ; Creve- 
cceur's Map of the Mouth of the Muskingum, 300, 301 ; Har- 
ris's Map of Marietta, 303 ; CoUot's View of Marietta, 305 ; 
View of the Campus Martins, 307 ; Barlow's Map of the Ohio 
Company's Purchase, 312, 313 ; Sketch of Fitch's Map of the 
Northwest, 322. 



CHAPTER XV. 

[IE Southwest Insecure, 1783-1786 .... 

Illustration : Filson's Map of Kentucky, 332, 333. 



326 



CHAPTER XVI. 

fiE Spanish Question, 1787-1789 351 

Illustrations : Plan of New Madrid, 363 ; Jedediah Morse's 
Map of the Northwest, 364, 365. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

^certainties in the Southwest, 1790 375 

Illustrations : Morse's Map of Georgia, 377 ; Samuel Lewis's 
Map of the Alabama Region, 381 ; Country of the Creeks, 383 ; 
Pond's Map of the Grand Portage, 391 ; Morse's Map of the 
Northwest Coast, 393. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

tE Conditions of 1790 

Illustrations : Portrait of Brissot, 403 ; Ohio Flatboat, 412. 



398 



CHAPTER XIX. 

'^rmar's and St. Clair's Campaigns, 1790-1791 
Illustration : Map of Moravian Settlements, 423. 



415 



CHAPTER XX. 

E Northwest Tribes at Last Defeated, 1792-1794 .... 434 
Illustrations : Map of Pittsburg and Wayne's Camp, 445 ; 
View of Niagara River, 449 ; Camp at Greenville, 452. 



viii CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

Jay's Treaty and the Territorial Integrity of the North- 
west Secured, 1794~179() 4(,. 

Illustrations : Guthrie's Map of Lake Sviperior and the Grand 
Portage, 469 ; Pond's Map of the Source of the Mississippi, 
471 ; Lewis's Map of the Genesee Country, 475. 

CHAPTER XXn. 

Wayne's Treaty and the New Northwest, 1794-1797 .... 4K 
Illustrations : Grants and Reservations in the Ohio Country, 
489 ; Morse's Map of the Northwestern Territory, 492, 493 ; 
Scott's Northwest Territory, 494, 495 ; Rufus Putnam's Map 
of Ohio, 496, 497 ; The Genesee Country, 499; The Mohawk 
and Wood Creek Route, 501 ; Map of the Lake Erie Route, 
503 ; Scott's Northwest Territory, 505 ; Heckewelder's Map of 
the Alleg'liany and Big Beaver Rivers, 507 ; Map of Western 
Routes, 509 ; Collot's Map of Pittsburg and Wheeling, 510 ; 
Morse's Map of Pennsylvania, 513. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

The Unrest of the Southwest, 1791-1794 5: 

Illustrations : Map of the Tennessee Government, 517 ; Tlie 
Chickasaw Country, 522 ; Map of Kentucky, 524, 525 ; Bar- 
ker's Map of Kentuckj', 527 ; Toulmin's Map of Kentucky, 
529 ; Spanish ]\Iap of the Grand Portage, 534, 535 ; River of 
the West, 537 ; Map of the Tennessee Region, 545. 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
Pincknf:y's Treaty and the Kentucky Intrigue, 1795-1796 . . 5tV- 

CHAPTER XXV. 
The United States Completed, 1790-1798 . 5.' 

INDEX 5 



THE WESTWARD ^MOVEMENT. 



CHAPTER I. 

AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY. 

The public and secret treaties of 1763 left France without 
a foothold on the American main. By the terms of the Peace 
of Paris, the Bourbon flag' fluttered in the islands of St. Pierre 
and Miquelon. The suspicion of what lay beyond these little 
fisliing stations at the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence 
had two centuries and a half before prompted the ambition of 
France to penetrate the continent by the great river of Canada. 
A century later her pioneers, following that current to its upper 
sources, had passed on to the Mississipjn, which forms the 
central artery of the continent. Here, a third of the way across 
the land's broad ex})anse, and not suspecting the greater dis- 
tance beyond, France had nurtured the hope of ascentling the 
western affluents of that parent stream, till she had com- 
passed, with her survey and jurisdiction, a greater France, 
stretching from the Alleghanies to the South Sea. This expec- 
tation had been dashed. Where she had counted upon seeing 
her royal standard shadowing soil and native alike, her flag- 
was now seen drooping at a few posts beyond the Mississippi, 
and awaiting" the demands of Spain to lower it. 

During the period which followed the Treaty of Ryswick 
1097), a scheme had often been broached among the English, 
»nt liad never prospered, which looked to thwarting the policy 
if France in the Great Valley. Tliis was to unite England and 
Spain in a movement to drive the French from tlie contiiu'ut, 
-nd divide the northern parts of the New World between their 
-spective crowns. This conjunction liad now come to pass, 
)ut not by any such international pact. 



2 AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY. 

In the same treaty of 170|3, Great Britain had acknowledge . 
a limit to the western exte^ion of her seaboard colonies 1 
accepting the Mississippi Riveras a boundary of her Americ; 
possessions. * The Atlantic colonies, with their impractical ' 
sea-to-sea charters, took no exception to such a reasonable ci: 
tailment of their western limits ; but when the king's proclami- 
tion followed, and the colonies found themselves confined to t ■■ 
seaward slope of the Appalachians, their western extensi- . 
made crown territory to be given over to the uses of ih>: 
Indians, and all attempts to occupy it forbidden, — there wei ■ 
signs of discontent which were easily linked with the resentme: i 
that defeated the Stamp Act. So the demand for a wester, i^ 
existence was a part of the first pulsation of resistance to t ■ 
mother country, and harbingered the American Revolution. 

To keep the opposition, which had thus been raised, with 
bounds, and once more to apply a territorial check, the Queb;i 
bill, in 1774, afforded one of the weighty charges, colored wi; 
current political rancor, which made up the Declaration of 1 
dependence. Britain had always denied that New France coi. 
cut athwart her colonial charters by any natural, geographic 
definition and extend to the Ohio and Mississippi; but in t 
Quebec bill it served her purpose to assume that Canada h ■. 
of right that convenient extension. 

In. the war which ensued, Virginia took the lead which s! ' 
had always taken in respect to this western region, and b • 
expedition under George Rogers Clark rendered it easier for t" • 
American commissioners, who negotiated the treaty of 1782, 
Xinclude this amjile domain within the American union, 
doing this they loyally defeated the intrigues of all the otli 
parties to the general treaty, — France, whom in the earlier wr . 
with England's help, the colonies had overcome ; Englan 
from whom,vwith French assistance, they had gained their inc 
pendence ; anclvSpain, whose insidious and vacillating poli 
they were yet-^nrW^r and successfully to combat. Each 
these powers had ^hoped to curtail the ambition of the youi 
Republic. Vergennes had succeeded in crippling England, b 
he feared the stalwart figure of the young nation born of En 
land's misfortune. He was ready, if he could, to use Englai 
in her new complacency to cripple the youthful America. 

The treaty of Independence was not so effective but th ' 



f 



AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY. 8 

there soon followed other efforts to prevent for a while the 
rounding out of the Republic to its legitimate bounds. Eng- 
land, on the side of Canada, and Spain, on the side of Louisiana, 
sought to regain something they had lost. The retention by 
Great Britain of the lake posts, including as they hoped the 
lake front, though with some show of right, was disgraced by 
base intrigues with Kentucky. All her schemes were brought 
to an end by Jay in the treaty of 1794. The occupation of 
the eastern bank of the Mississippi from the Yazoo country, 
southward, by Spain, and the plotting of Miro with Wilkinson 
and his associates to establish a Spanish protectorate south of 
the Ohio, were defeated at last by the treaty of San Lorenzo 
in 1795. 

Adding the time which was necessary to carry out these 
treaties, it is now an even hundred years since the title of the 
United States to this vast region lying between the Appala- 
chians, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi was unmistakably 
confirmed. For more than thirty years after the peace of 1763, 
the colonies and the Republic struggled to maintain the Ameri- 
can spirit on this eastern-central area of the continent. Inde- 
pendence achieved, for twelve or fifteen years the United States 
strove to round out its territorial promise. The history of this 
western region during all these years was constantly moulded 
by its geography, and it is the purpose of the present volume to 
show the ever varying aspects of this struggle. 

To establish what was called the Property Line was the first 
signal step taken in behalf of the seaboard to assert a right to 
enter upon this teri-itory, and to that initiatory measure we 
devote the opening of the story. 






CHAPTER II. 

THE PROPERTY LINE. 
1763-1764. 

Two yeai's before the Treaty of Paris (1763), James Otis had 
argued in Boston against issuing Writs of Assistance to detect 
evasions of the revenue. A service of law, which in England 
had been constantly accepted, aroused in an unwilling people a 
rebellious spirit. How to restrain this threatening impulse was 
already a serious question ; and there was regret with some that 
Canada had not been left at the peace in French hands, to 
remain a menace to the colonies, and hold them dejjendent on 
England's protection. 

The existence of this recalcitrant temper had been often cited 
in the arguments of those who preferred Guadaloupe to Canada 
in the settling the account with France. Lookers-on in the 
colonies, like Kalm, had perceived the force of this view. 
Choiseul saw it, and predicted the fatal outcome of England's 
final choice. Vergennes, chagrined at the drop in political 
influence which France had experienced, welcomed this hope of 
disaster to an ancient rival of France, which her sacrifice of 
Canada might produce. 

Colden and others in the colonies were conscious that the 
loyal subjects of England must face new hazards when the 
British flag was hoisted at Quebec. This New Yorker repre- 
sented to the Board of Trade in London that New England was 
the nursery of this threatening passion, and that it was neces- 
sary, if her republican hopes were to be chilled, to curtail the 
Yankees' bounds by extending New York to the Connecticut 
River. In September, 1764, word reached Albany that the 
king in council had stretched the jurisdiction of New York over 
what is now known as Vermont. Francis Bernard went farther. 
He not only urged this extension to the Connecticut, but he 
wished that the boundaries of the rest of New Enoland should 



THE FRENCH AND INDIAN. 5 

be redistributed, in a sort of gerrymandering waj', so as to 
insure a government majority in every part, and during 1766 
and 1767 he was in close correspondence with the home govern- 
ment on this point. 

Murray, who had been appointed governor at Quebec in 
October, 1763, did not reach his post till August of the next 
year. It was not long before he was making reports to the 
home government which w^ere startling on two points. One was 
that the British then in Canada " were the meanest and most 
immoral people he ever saw% while the [French] Canadians 
were frugal, industrious, and moral, and had become reconciled 
to the English rule." The report also anticipated the action 
which, ten years later, the daring of the seaboard colonies forced 
the English ministry to take in the Quebec bill. Murray's 
proposition was to annex the region lying beyond the Allegha- 
nies to Canada, as a means of overawing the older colonies. 
The gentleness of Murray with the Canadians was in rather 
painful contrast with Gage's plan of using them against the 
Indians. He advised Bradstreet (May 3, 1764) "to employ 
them in every service that can render them the most obnoxious 
to the Indians. Whatever is to be done most disagreeable to 
the Indians, let the Canadians have a large share in it. This 
will convince them, if anything will, how vain their hopes are 
of success from that quarter." If this policy was inspired 
by the home government, as well as another policy wdiich was 
aimed at the repression of the natural subjects of the crow^n, 
one could well have predicted the later alliance of 1778. 

A recent historian, in his I^.rjx/nsion of England, speaks of 
the prevalence in the mother country at this time of a " not 
unnatural bitterness," which accompanied the fear that Britain 
had enabled her colonies to do without her. Seeley once again, 
writing of the century of English history from Louis XIY. to 
Napoleon, advises the English reader to recognize the fact that 
his countiy's real history during tliis interval was in the New 
World, where England successively fought France and her own 
colonies, in the effort to sustain her power. AVith this in mind, 
the student of British rule would not find, he adds, "that 
century of English histoiy so iminteresting." 

The fall of Xew France lind produced sharp effects upon the 



6 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

relations of America and England. The war had increased the 
British debt by £850,000,000. The rights of the mother coun- 
try, which affected the commerce and industry of her colonies, 
were at this time both brutal and mercenary. Viscount Bury 
says : " It may fairly be stated that the advantage reaped by 
a few shipowners from the operation of the navigation laws 
was purchased by an actual money expenditure of more than 
£200,000,000, in less than half a century." England was con- 
tent to let the American pioneers break out the paths for a 
newer and perhaps greater Britain ; but it was her policy first 
of all to make these plodders of the wilderness pay tribute to 
the stay-at-home merchant. That such injustice was according 
to law and precedent did not meet the questions which the 
Americans raised, — questions such as are constantly needing 
adjustment to newer environments. 

The population in the seaboard colonies was doubling, as 
Franklin cominited, in twenty-five years. The bonds of inter- 
colonial sympathies were strengthening, and the designations of 
New Englander and Virginian were beginning to give place to 
American. With these conditions among the colonists^ it was 
not unnatural that a proposition of the ministry to tax them on 
a system repellent to colonial views created distrust. A period 
of doubt is always one of rumors. Bernard's plea for readjust- 
ing the New England bounds made John Adams and others 
suspect that the British government intended to revoke the 
colonial charters and make the colonies royal provinces. The 
terms of the royal proclamation of 1763, which Gage received 
in New York on November 30, indicated, as already said, that 
under the new dispensation the westward extension of the 
colonies' bounds would be curtailed by the mountains, and the 
spaces of the Great Valley would be confirmed to savagery. 
There were further symptoms of this in the movement now 
going on in Pennsylvania to induce the king to recompense its 
proprietary and make it a royal domain. The king might 
indeed be preferable to a stubborn master. 

If the heady motions of the ministry were without tact, there 
was some warrant for its belief that the colonies, despite acts 
of trade and navigation, were prosperous enough to share the 
burdens of the mother country. Maryland and Virginia were 
dispatching large shipments of wheat to England. Philadel- 



THE PROCLAMATION OF 17 63. 7 

pliia alone, the readiest port for sliipi^ing such products as came 
over the mountains, was now sending abroad four hundred ves- 
sels annually carrying exports to the value of £700,000. New 
England built and sent across the sea for sale fifty ships a year. 

If such things indicated to the government a source of reve- 
nue, it was beginning to warn some observers that the colonies 
had it quite within their power to sustain a practical autonomy. 
When, in 1762, the ministry secured an uncompromising adlier- 
ent in making William Franklin the governor of New Jersey, 
the act had no such effect upon his father, and it was not long- 
before Benjamin Franklin was warning the ministry that " griev- 
ous tyranny and oppression " might drive his compatriots to 
revolt. The colonies had indeed struggled on, in facing the 
French, without cohesion ; but injustice — and it mattered 
little whether it was real or imagined — was yet to bind them 
toaether, as the dangers of a common foe had never done. 

The immediate struggle over the Stamp Act, which was 
closed by its repeal in 1766, produced for a time at least that 
political quiet which induces enterprise. The attention of the 
pioneers was again drawn to the western movement, and the hu- 
mane spirit once again dwelt on the prohibition which the 
luckless proclamation of 1763 had put upon the ardent pioneer. 
Bouquet, falling in with the views of the ministry, was now urg- 
ing- that all grants west of the mountains should be annulled. 
This would include the abolishment of the Ohio Company, and 
would very closely affect the Virginia gentlemen. 

It was also Bouquet's opinion that the policing of this west- 
ern wilderness and the enforcement of the proclamation should 
T)e intrusted to the military. There was need of it. Since 
Governor Penn in June, 1765, had again opened the Indian 
trade by proclamation, the packmen had crossed the moun- 
tains, and a following of vagabonds was occasionally i)rovoking 
the Indians to retaliate for the wrongs which were done them. 
Thus occasional scenes of devastation on the frontiers of Penn- 
sylvania and Virginia were calling- for mutual ex])lanations 
between the white and the red man ; still the great body of the 
Indians had, since the close of Pontiac's war, ceased their havoc. 
The trouble was mainly with the whites. " I am really vexed," 
wrote Gage to Johnson (May 5, 1766), " at the behavior of the 
lawless banditti upon the borders ; and what aggravates the 



8 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

more is the difficulty to bring them to punishment." There 
was a limit to the Indian forbearance, but there were ten years 
yet to pass before the warwhoops of the Dunmore turmoil 
awoke the echoes of the Ohio woods. 

During this interval the main dispute of the frontiers, be- 
tween the home government and the natives, was how to protect 
the hunting-grounds of the tribes and at the same time give 
some scope to the ambition of the pioneer. Sir William John- 
son, as Indian agent, had faced hard problems before ; but he 
never had a more difficult question than that which now con- 
fronted him. The French had indeed publicly withdrawn from 
the situation, but he could not divest himself of the belief that 
they were still exerting a clandestine influence, which was more 
difficult to deal with. A part of this influence lay in the ex- 
periences of the Indians with the French. " When I was in 
Canada," said Gage, " I could not find that the French had 
ever purchased land of the Indians, — only settled amongst 
them by permission and desire." Again he writes to Johnson, 
" We are plagued everywhere about lands. The French had 
never any dispute with the Indians about them, though they 
never purchased a single acre ; and I believe the Indians have 
made difficulty with us because we have gone on a different 
plan." 

Things had now come to such a pass on the frontier that 
Johnson saw the necessity of establishing some definite line of 
separation between the colonies and their Indian neighbors, and 
of maintaining it. When a savage said to him that the Eng- 
lish always stole the Indian lands by the rum bottle, Johnson 
knew well all that it implied. With a purpose on each side, the 
one to sell and the other to buy, and with liquor as the barter- 
ing medium, nothing could shield the Indian from wrong. In 
order to make a beginning in the interests of right and to pro- 
mote peace, Johnson dispatched George Croghan to England 
to sound the government on the project of such a line ; and 
while Croghan was there Johnson instructed him to memorial- 
ize the Board of Trade about the desirability of securing land 
south of the Ohio to satisfy the demands of the Ohio Company, 
and the claims of the soldiers enlisted by Dinwiddie in 1754, 
under a promise of land. Preliminary to this, and for the pur- 
pose of bringing the Indians to terms of mutual confidence 



THE SOUTHERN BOUNDARY. 9 

among themselves, Johnson had exerted himself to make peace 
between the leading tribes o£ the North and South. The Vir- 
ginians, as Gage wrote to Johnson some time before (March 3, 
17G6), were intent on such a plan, hoping thereb}^ to prevent 
the Cherokees taking revenge on the Iroquois, for some murders 
committed by the young men of the latter. In December, 
17G7, three Cherokee chiefs j^resented themselves at Johnson 
Hall, on this errand. The Iroquois were siunmoned, and on 
March 4, 17G8, the friendly pact between them was made. 

The movement for this boundary settlement had in the start 
a greater impulse at the South than at the North. It had for 
some time devolved upon John Stuart, as the Indian agent for 
the southern colonies, to deal with the Cherokees in matters 
touching both the whites and the savages. He had brought 
about a conference at Augusta, where the Creeks had ceded 
some territory to Georgia " in proof of the sense they have of 
His Majesty's goodness in forgetting past offenses." 

As it happened, the irresponsible conduct of the Carolina 
traders was rendering it necessary to act promptly, particularly 
if peace was to prevail among its tribes, since the whites always 
suffered in such times. The rivalry of the French had much 
conduced in the past to make the English liberal in their gra- 
tuities. That open rivalry failing, the generous habit of the 
English had slackened, and the Choctaws had not failed to 
remark upon it. The French at New Orleans used this neglect 
to point a moral for the occasion. 

The inroads of the wliites upon the tribal territories had 
always been a source of alarm to the Indians, and Stuart had, in 
August, 1765, urged restraining them by a fixed line. We fine], 
in 1766, that a deputation of Indians was in England, pleading 
with the government against the injustice of the colonists; 
and this may have had something to do with the repeated warn- 
ings which Stuart received in 1766 to avoid an Indian rupture. 
The instances of encroachment were cumulative, but the Indians 
took new alarm when these trespasses seemed to be made on a 
system, as was implied in the movement to extend the province 
bounds to the west. This pur])ose had been in part determined 
upon to protect the few settlers who were well within the 



10 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

Indian territory. The bounds of South Carolina had been 
ah-eady pushed upon the country of the Catawbas, and in April 
and May, 1766, there had been preliminary surveys towards 
the Cherokees ; but in December, the running of the line had 
been postponed till the spring, and when completed it was not 
carried to the North Carolina limit. 

Governor Tryon had succeeded Dobbs in the executive chair 
of North Carolina in 1764, and it fell to him to handle this 
question of bounds, as it did later some more serious questions. 
In February, 1767, Shelburne had advised him to deal tenderly 
with the Indians, for tidings had reached the ministry of what 
he thought unaccountable risks which the people of the back 
country were taking in their treatment of the Indians. On the 
1st of June, Tryon met the Cherokees at Tyger River, and he 
had what was called " a straight and good talk " with them. 
There were mutual phrases of concession, and each confessed 
that it would be much easier to live in harmony, but for the 
" rogues " on either side. A line planned in October, 1765, 
was considered, and on June 13 it was agreed upon. This 
line, beginning at Reedy River, ran north to Tryon Mountain, 
which is described as being within three or four miles of the 
springs of the streams flowing towards the Mississippi. Thence 
the line ran to Chiswell Mines, and along the Blue Ridge, east 
of north, sixty or seventy miles. On July 16, the decision was 
made public, and all who had settled beyond were warned to 
withdraw by New Year's of 1768. It was further determined 
that no grants should be made reaching within a mile of the line. 

There was still the region back of Virginia and extending to 
the Ohio, which it was even more necessary to bring under 
control. Hillsborough had instructed Stuart to force the Cher- 
okees, who were the main southern claimants of this region, to 
an agreement. This agent met the tribe at Hardlabor, S. C, 
on October 14, 1768. These Indians professed to hold the 
territory east and north of the Cherokee [Tennessee] River — 
their usual route to the Mississippi — as a hunting-ground, but 
were content to yield all east of the Kanawha, from its mouth 
upwards, and on this basis the treaty was made. This deci- 
sion was approved by the Board of Trade and recommended to 
the king. This was necessary, as it threw open to the pioneers 



THE VIRGINIANS. 11 

the valley of the Greenbrier and other eastern affluents of the 
Kanawha on the west of the Atlantic divide, and was thus at 
variance with the royal proclamation. It was at once so far 
established as a " ministerial line " that Hillsborough included 
it in the prohibition which he had attached in April to the line 
farther south, when he warned all who should transgress by 
passing- it. He had already informed Stuart that the king- 
would never consent to new grants below the Kanawha, and 
might recall some already made. This meant much, for the 
king's " friends," under Grafton, had come into power, and it 
seemed they were to be his thralls, not his advisers. 

This definition of bounds by the Kanawha was only less offen- 
sive to Virginia than the proclamation of 1763 had been, for 
it was still a virtual curtailment of her territorial pretensions. 
Washington and others interested in the Ohio Company had 
looked upon the proclamation as simply an ostensible show of 
words for satisfying the Indians without really abridging the 
rights of the colony. A jiact of the government with the Indians, 
as the Hardlabor agreement had been, was somewhat more 
serious, and it was not long, as we shall see, before this difficulty 
was almost entirely removed. 

There was among the colonists of the Old Dominion a 
marked diiference of character between the tide-water people 
and those who had crossed the mountains, or had entered the 
Shenandoah Valley from the north. Burnaby, who had trav- 
ersed the colony a few years before, had found " a spirit of 
enterprise by no means the turn of Virginia ; " but he derived 
his opinion from his intercourse with the large landed propri- 
etors near the Atlantic rivers. These found nothing more 
exciting than their Christmas revelries, their hunts in the wil- 
derness, their county politics, and their annual shipments of 
tobacco at the river fronts of their plantations. They showed 
little disposition to develop the country away fi-om their own 
neighborhoods. While, however, this was true of most of the 
gentlemen of the lower country, there were a few among them 
quite ready, as we shall see, to act in the faith which Bur- 
naby shows he imbibed, when he speaks of the Potomac as a 
water-way to the great divide, and "of as great consequence 
as any river in America." 

But the development of the frontiers of Virginia was not 



12 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

dependent on the tide-water gentry and their inferior servitors, 
but rather upon the virile folk, particularly the Scotch-Irish, 
who had broiight the valley of Virginia into subjection, and 
were now adding to their strength by an immigration from 
]VIaryland, Pennsylvania, and north Virginia. These, crossing 
the divide by Braddock's road, were pushing down the Monon- 
gahela, and so on to the Ohio country. They carried with them 
all that excitable and determined character which goes with a 
keen-minded adherence to original sin, total depravity, predesti- 
nation, and election, and saw no use in an Indian but to be a 
target for their bullets. 

No region in North America at this time had the repute of 
being so inviting and fertile as this valley of the great eastern 
tributary of the Mississippi. In 1765, the present town of 
Pittsburg had been laid out at the forks of the Ohio, two hun- 
dred feet from the old fort which had sprung in air from a 
mine, at the time of Forbes's a]iproach in 1759, and of which 
we have a relic of Bouquet's enlargement in a brick bastion, 
still or of late preserved as a dwelling in the modern town. 
The place was now the centre of a frontier vigor, which kept 
pace with the growing influence of the anti-Quaker element in 
the province. It was to this latter conservative and sluggish 
faction that the Germans mainly adhered. These were in large 
part a boorish people, impregnated with the slavish traits of 
the redemptioners ; good farmers, who cared more for their 
pigs than for their own comfort, uniting thrift with habits that 
scorned education, clannish, and never forgetful of the Rhine. 
They with the Quakers had made a party in the government, 
which, from principle and apathy, had in the late war sorely 
tried the patience of Franklin and those jealous of the ci-edit 
of the province. There had already begun to appear a palpa- 
ble decline of the Quaker power l)efore the combined energies 
of the Philadelphia traders and the frontier woodsmen, with 
not a little assistance from the enlightened activities of the 
better class of Germans. It was the energy of this restless 
faction which induced Burnaby to speak of the Pennsylvanians 
as " by far the most enterprising people of the continent." He 
contrasted them with the A'irginians, who, thougli having every 
advantage of easier communication beyond the mountains, had 
shown much less spirit. 



CROGHAN AND THE INDIANS. 13 

From Pittsburg' the current of the Ohio carried a depth of 
three feet for seventy-five miles, to a settlement of some sixty 
native families, known as the Mingo town. This was the only 
cluster of habitations at this time between the forks and the 
rapids at the modern Louisville. Beyond this Indian town, 
the water was deep enough. The variegated banks, with the 
windings of the current, offered, as Colonel Gordon, a recent 
voyager, had said, '* the most healthy, pleasant, commodious, 
and fertile spot of earth known to European people," and a 
little later it was represented to Hillsborough that "• no part 
of North America would require less encouragement for the 
production of naval stores and raw material for manufactures 
in Europe." Such praise as this was later to reach a wider 
public in Thomas Hutchinss Description of Virginia^ etc., 
when published in London. This topographer had been a cap- 
tain in Bouquet's army, which put an end to the Pontiac war. 
He first surveyed the country through which Bouquet marched 
in 1703-64. AYe have a map, which is the result of his obser- 
vations at that time and on later visits. 

The movement by the Monongahela and by the valley of 
Virginia had naturally opened the way into what is now Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee. All this had alarmed the Indians, and 
in April and May, 1768, about 1,100 w^arriors of the Iroquois, 
Delawares, and Shawnees, beside women and children, assem- 
bled at the insti"ation of Georoe Croshan at Fort Pitt. '• With 
this string- of wampum," said that interpreter to them, " I 
clean the sweat off your bodies, and remove all evil thoughts 
from your minds, and clean the passage to your hearts. . . . 
A\'ith this string I clean your ears that you may hear." Then 
followed apologies for the murder of certain Indians b}^ wdcked 
whites. Another })ropitiation was made. '' Witli this belt 
I clean the blood oft' the leaves and earth, whereon it was 
sprinkled, that the sweet herbs may have their usual verdure." 
Beaver, a Delaware chief, replied : "• Take hold of the end of 
this belt, which we may stretch along the road between us, in 
order to clean it of the briars and brush, that we may all travel 
it in peace and safety." 

There was next a little altercation between a Shawnee and 
an Iroquois chief. The Shawnee wished the English to pull 



14 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

down their forts, and thought that the boats which the English 
were building signilied an evil purpose of going in them down 
the river. The Iroquois stood for the English, and advised them 
to hold the forts they had taken from the French. When it 
was proposed to send messengers to the interloiDers on the 
Monongahela at Red Stone and warn them off, the Indians 
refused to lend a hand in the ejectment. The Shawnees again 
made bold to dispute the Iroquois pretensions to the Ohio 
country. So the symptoms were clear that trouble could easily 
be fostered in the valley, and during the previous summer some 
Indians had stopj^ed the bateaux of pioneers, and the river 
route was in general made dangerous by the mutual hostilities 
of the Cherokees and the northern tribes. 

In December, 1767, the Board of Trade had deemed the 
Kanawha River an equitable limit for the English settlements. 
Such a limit, restricting what Hillsborough judged the danger- 
ous extension of agriculture, also met the approval of that 
minister. 

Franklin, now in London as the agent of Pennsylvanif , 
pointed out to the government how delays were only making 
the colonies drift into a savage war. Shelburne was soon 
moved to action, and in April, 1768, Gage, who had received 
Shelburne's instructions to run the line, forwarded them to 
Johnson with a suspicion that it would be difficult to satisfy 
the demands of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, in 
whatever line was run. Gage had already urged, in February, 
that the plan had been satisfactorily carried out at the south 
by Georgia and the Carolinas. 

The task of establishing such a line imposed difficulties upon 
the negotiator. Johnson had only recently had difficulty in 
getting the Indians to consent to the running of the line between 
Pennsylvania and Maryland beyond the mountains, and he felt 
sure that both French and Spanish were endeavoring to entice 
the Ohio tribes to a counter conference on the Mississippi. 
When Johnson had first broached the subject of a line at a 
conference of Iroquois in the spring of 1765, he had found 
some difficulty in bringing them to his conception of what such 
a line should be. When the Indians had made some conces- 
sions, he was obliged to confess he had no authority to settle 
the question. Accordingly, after three years of delay, during 



FORT ST AN W IX TREATY. 



15 



which the ministry had been instructing him to keep a peace 
with the Indians, and with some untoward happenings in the 
interval, it was not without misgivings that Sir William, 
accompanied by two hundred boats of merchandise £or presents, 
reached Fort Stanwix on September 20, 17G8. Prominent 




Note. — This map is a section of Guy Johnson's map of the Fort Stanwix line, sent by Sir 
William Jolnisou to Lord Hillsborough, and reproduced in Docs. rel. to the Colon. Hist, of N. Y., 
vol. viii. p. 136. 

among his advisers in attendance were Governor Franklin, 
Guy Johnson, and George Croghan. The Indians assembled 
so slowly that it was October 24 before it was deemed prudent 
to open the conference. By this time it was certain that nearly 
thirty-two hundred cavernous mouths were to be fed, and that 
other entertainments must be provided with equal prodigality. 
Johnson, indeed, soon found that there was difficulty in get- 
ting a sufficient allowance from the treasury at headquarters, 
owing to the great cost of quartering troops in Boston, now 
going on to meet the rebellious manifestations of that commu- 
nity. So the seven weeks of feasts and talks went on. Thomas 
Walker had come with authority from Virginia to undo the 
Stuart treaty and the Kanawha line, if he could. There were 
other delegates from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsyl- 
vania, together with a number of agents repi-esenting the 
traders who had suffered losses in the Pontiac war. 



16 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

This large assembly of savages was, in fact, a considerable 
j^art of the whole number of tribes interested in the outcome 
of the conference. Johnson at this time estimated that the 
Iroquois numbered perhaps ten thousand souls, and of these 
two thousand could be considered warriors. Their allies could 
furnish probably another two thousand, made up among others 
of three hundred Shawnees from the Ohio country, six hundred 
Delawares from the Susquehanna, and two hundred Wyandots 
from Sandusky. These four thousand Iroquois and depend- 
ents, so great had been their losses, were probably not more 
than half as many as the Ottawa confederacy. This larger 
amalgamation of the savage power, including the Twightwees 
and Miamis, hemmed in the others on the west, and blocked 
the way to the Mississippi. Johnson now reckoned them at 
eight thousand warriors, of whom about three thousand were 
on the Detroit River. He makes no mention of any tribes in 
what is now Kentucky, and Croghan seems to confirm the 
belief that the territory between the Ohio and the Tennessee 
was destitute of savage dwellers, and this was the region now 
the particular object of negotiation. 

It was not till November 5 that a conclusion was reached 
at Fort Stanwix, when, in consideration of a considerable sum 
of money, the Indians consented to a line, beyond which the 
English agreed to prohibit settling. The Iroquois chiefs signed 
with the colonial delegates ; but the Delawares and Shawnees, 
though assenting, were not allowed to sign, since they were 
dependent upon the Iroquois. 

The territory which was thus alienated was vested, under the 
terms of the treaty, in the crown, and could only l)e occupied 
by royal grant. It was soon claimed that, so far as these lands 
were concerned, the royal proclamation was annulled. 

Johnson, in directing the negotiations, had exceeded his 
authority, and, as the Virginians claimed, he had thwarted the 
purposes which Dr. Walker had been sent to advance. John- 
son had been directed to confirm Stuart's line by the Kanawha, 
and to yield to the Cherokee pretensions as respects the terri- 
tory west of that river. The Iroquois, however, asserted their 
rights in this region against the Cherokees, and Johnson thought 
it imprudent to arouse their resentment by declining their 
cession of it. Johnson satisfied his own conscience in the 



FORT STANWIX TREATY 



17 




[From the French translation of Hutchins, Description topographique de la Virf/inia, Paris, 
1781.] 

matter by recallino; that the Cherokees some years before had 
recognized the Iroquois rights to it. He felt also that, by con- 
firmins: it to the crown, the sfovernnient would not be embar- 
rassed in controlling its settlement as they liked. In this way 
what became later known as " The Property Line " practically 
gave Kentucky over to present occupation. 



18 



THE PROPERTY LINE. 




LAKE ON TA RIO 




Bv du'y4-itMfr% of t*f sur Vti/Jt'/iS /'rrpiLr IS nir/tnf fAat part wifA{/t wkicA. tArv prt^wt/'i ^/t 
OJtJiry rcsit/e M/l/rtff th^ hmi t.< • / A T^rk ui Fi.'t ffujti^ri Cpn<yck^>-^ ptu-t 4^tA^ i'rfft/,' 



JB^Z 



Note. — The line is sliowii on a larger scale in a map constructed by Jolmson upon Evans's 
Kittanniug followed that river to its mouth. 

The reg^ion east of the Kanawha and west of the Mononga- 
hela had already two days before (November 3) been deeded by 
the Indians to Trent, as the agent of the traders, whose prop- 
erty in the recent war had been despoiled to an extent, as was 
contended, of <£86,000. Out of this transaction difficulties soon 
arose. The Ohio Company held the land thus conveyed to be 



THE " INDIANA " GRANT. 



19 




tf the- On€uUi 



fyr liu fruuiry sIlU Miii^x 



{ % ^M 

r, C ' V open 






1 



i ' y 






O^ 



% 



yVjUy ^j Shenoctailj- 









iertooi-:'/ passadiiis' 

. ,- v, - It - I ^s.'ts nay ■ 



(.<)tmp*tiriil 




To H' -^^xceUency. XS 
■sV»j>-,^r WILLIAJVI TrTOxV ESQf; ,.\% 
^""^1 i CaiJtain Geueral & Govern©*, iti CSfim ti ^ 

>I.ANAT10X e ^f a,,..pj.^,.,^,Ce of ^VM-YO^K&.^Sl 

^.,..,j.r,ry-"r.,ts\ . This Map ,yjr 

y)^^/^ , , J ^ ol tlie Country of the VI. Nations /'^^ 

, , , , \ii'?yo\y^X^7^'ilhj\rioftheQ.diacerLt(ilcn«}\i 
' , . ,■ ^ U ).} hunthlij irucrihcd hy hu c.'CCi'/lrnctr 1 

(jt^ Jo f} TIM) II /7/>.~7'--' 



/ I 




J 

J 

map, improved, in the Documrntnrn Hist, of X. V., vol. i. p. 5ST. The line reaching the Ohio at 

included in their own prior grants, wliicli were known as 
" Indiana," and stood in the names of Samuel "Wharton, Wil- 
liam Trent, Georo-e ]\Iorgan, and others. Virginia recognized 
no rights in it but her own, as coming within her charter, and 
she claimed that some of her own people had already settled 
within the disputed territory. All disputes were finally sunk 
in the troubles of the Ke volution. 



20 THE PROPERTY LINE. 

The line, as established at Fort Stanwix, followed up the 
Ohio from the Cherokee River, passed the forks, and went up 
the Alleghany to Kittanning. It then ran west to the most 
westerly branch of the west fork of the Susquehanna ; thence 
over Burnet's Hills to Awandoe Creek, and so to the Delaware. 
It then ascended this river towards Owegy and Wood Creek, 
and stopped at a point half way between Fort Stanwix and 
Lake Oneida. 

The line, by reason of Johnson's independent action, was not 
approved by the king, but the government did not venture to 
invalidate it. When it thus practically became the law, new 
conditions arose. It opened a larger area to settlement than 
the royal proclamation had decreed, and vesting new rights in 
the crown, it was held by most, except the Virginians, to place 
a bar, to the extent of the territory ceded by the Indians, to 
the westward' claims of Virginia. 

This line of demarcation between the Indians and the settle- 
ments was now unbroken from where it started at the earlier 
grant near Lake Ontario to the southern end of the Appala- 
chians, except for an interval where the bounds back of South 
and North Carolina had not been made to join. This debatable 
ground remained for some time the scene of insecurity : the 
doubtful jurisdiction invited vagabonds and lawless traders, 
who traversed the country between the Catawbas and the 
Cherokees. It was of such hazardous conditions that Stuart, 
the Indian agent, spoke, when he commented upon the ''I'age for 
settling far back," which crowded settlers upon the boundary, 
and left the country scant of inhabitants on the way thither. 
" The Indians detest such back inhabitants," he adds, " which 
accounts for their reluctancy to give up any of their lands, 
being anxious to keep such neighbors at a distance." 

The dispute between the Iroquois and the Cherokees would, 
it was feared, seriously involve the interests of such as received 
grants in what are now the States of Kentucky and Tennessee. 
It was not long before Gage was warning Johnson of " an agi- 
tation among the Indians." That the Iroquois should have been 
paid for territory which the Cherokees claimed was galling to 
the pride of the latter. 

The Cherokee [Tennessee] River bends near Cumberland 



MOVEMENTS Full OCCUPATION. 21 

Gap, separated by a divide from the springs of the Kanawha. 
The area in controversy, including the valley of the Cumber- 
land, lay between these rivers and the Ohio. The purposes of 
the home government and those of the pioneers regarding this 
territory were equally at variance, the one sustaining, in opinion 
at least, the treaty of Stuart, and the other that of Johnson. 
Gage was fully aware of the risks of occupying the region south 
of the Ohio. To do so, in his judgment, could hardly fail to 
bring on a war with the southern Indians. The ministry, in 
view of the opposition which had been developed to the royal 
proclamation, was not unwise in winking at what it dared not 
undo. 

This opening of a fertile country to occupation induced the 
steady movements westward to and beyond Cumberland Gap 
which took place in the next few years. Dr. Thomas Walker, 
whose name is so often associated with these early movements, 
and who had been more or less familiar with Powell's Valley 
and the neighboring region for twenty years, soon secured a 
grant hereabouts. Throwing it open to the pioneers, a rush of 
settlers to occupy it followed. In the spring of 17G9, there 
was a race of rival parties seeking to reach the spot first and 
secure the land. Victory came to Joseph Martin and his com- 
panions, and they were earliest squatted in the rich valley, 
shadowed with black walnuts and wild cherries, which lies 
between Cumberland and Powell mountains. The modern 
Martin's Station, where they pitched their tents, was on the 
hunter's trail to Kentucky, and twenty miles from Cumberland 
Gap. The situation, however, was precarious, for there were 
roving bands of southern Indians, who were incensed that the 
pledge given in the Stuart treaty had not been observed. 
While Martin and some of his people were exploring farther 
west, hostile savages swooped down on those in camp, and the 
settlement was broken up. There is no lack of suspicion that 
in this and other marauding, the vicious trader was supplying 
the barbarian with his gun and powder. 

So it was that the proclamation of 1763 was practically de- 
fied, and the ministry had not dared to interpose its authority. 



CHAPTER in. 

LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

1763-1768. 

It is curious to find tlie French traveler, Pages, in 1767, 
speaking- of the Mississippi as bounding on New England ! 
The reservation of the trans-AUeghany country to the Indians' 
use, by the proclamation of 1763, had not eradicated from the 
conceptions of the French the old sea-to-sea claims of the 
English charters. They had too long confronted this English 
pretension to do more than recognize the curtailment of their 
claims by making that river the western boundary of those 
colonies, as required by the recent treaty. 

In the colonies themselves, the claim was certainly dormant. 
Massachusetts, for her rights, was abiding her time. Connecti- 
cut was even now, on the strength of such a title, claiming a 
portion of Pennsylvania, and for the next few years, in the 
struggle between the two provinces, the New England colony 
was to be in the main successful in sustaining her Susquehanna 
Company, though it was at the cost of life and property. Both 
colonies, in the effort to defend what they thought their own, 
had devastated homes and wasted crops, and each was alter- 
nately the aggressor. 

Virginia was still vigilantly looking after her western inter- 
ests, and she did it to some piirpose ten years later, when her 
George Rogers Clark did much to save the Northwest to the 
young Republic. Franklin, in 1754, would have swept all such 
pretensions away by his barrier colonies. During the years 
that had intervened, he had not forgotten his purpose, as we 
shall see. 

The peace of 1763 had had its effect upon the Indian ti'ade 
of the far West. The English seaboard merchants had become 
conscious how much this traffic had slipped away from their 



ST. LOUIS AND THE FRENCH. 23 

western agents. Such diminution had been the subject of 
repeated representations. George Croghan was exphiining it 
to General Gage in New York and to Dr. Franklin in London. 
Carleton complained that French and 82)anish traders were 
gathering furs within twenty leagues of Detroit. Gage com- 
mented upon it to Conway, and hinted at the clandestine ways 
which were used by the Indians and French. Sir William 
Johnson also found artifice in the French methods, but it would 
seem to have been nothing more than that the traders got ten- 
pence a pound more for skins in New Orleans than in any 
British market. 

The unwelcome outcome of the business was the preeminence 
which the new settlement at St. Louis, under French enter- 
prise, was likely to acquire. Hutchins speaks of the site of the 
new town as " the most healthy and pleasurable situation of 
any known in this part of the country," and hither (he adds), 
" by conciliating the affections of the natives," the French 
traders have drawn the trafttc of the Missouri, Mississippi, 
Wisconsin, and Illinois rivers away from the English posts. 
St. Louis had become in a few years a town of about one hun- 
dred and twenty stone-built houses. The occupants of these 
dwellings, including a hundred and fifty negroes, numbered 
about eight hundred. Not far off was Ste. Genevieve, a place 
of more than four hundred inhabitants. These two settlements 
constituted the only French villages on the western bank of the 
Mississippi. Neighboring, but on the eastern bank, and so 
within the English jurisdiction, were some three hundred more 
French, with a serving body of nearly as many blacks. Tliese 
were the communities which were seeking to turn the Indian 
l)roducts into channels which would carry them down the Mis- 
sissippi on their way to the sea. The French Canadians, who 
were now looking to the English to i)rotect their western 
trade, complained that unless the English were more enter- 
l)rising and built new 2>osts, the Indian ti-ade toward the Mis- 
sissippi would all slip away. Neither did the English, who were 
now coming into Canada in order to reap a harvest in the fur 
trade, view the conditions witli more com])laeency. Carleton, 
who had ruled in Quebec since September, 1766, opened a 
correspondence with Johnson in order to seek a remedy, but 
Gage saw it was simply a game of sharp practice at which both 



24 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

sides were privileged to play. When it was reported to him 
that the French aud Spanish were endeavoring to lure the 
savages to their interest, he' replied that " we have no reason to 
reproach them, as we aim at the same thing," and he spoke the 
truth. He was quite as complacent when one warned him of 
the Indians' efforts to embroil the English with the French, 
"■ They might well like to do it," he said, "" for our quarrels are 
the Indian harvests." 

The trade of that part of this distant country lying west of 
the Lake of the Woods had been drawn in large part to the 
English factors at Hudson's Bay. From Lake Superior the 
traders were already pushing to Rainj^ Lake, and by 1770 they 
had established posts on Lake Winnijieg and beyond, as well as 
farther south on the upper branches of the Mississippi. 

Trading- west of Detroit had been prohibited except by 
license, and under such a privilege Alexander Henry had en- 
joyed the freedom of Lake Superior. But police control in 
such conditions was impossible, and it was not unlikely that 
the trader without a license turned his tracks down the Great 
Valley, rather than risk detection on the St. Lawrence. The 
English commander at Fort Chartres was always complaining 
that the traders on the oj^posite sides of the Mississippi acted 
in collusion. There were ninety carrying places between the 
Lake of the Woods and Montreal. It was not strange that the 
trading canoes were oftener seen gliding on the almost uninter- 
rupted current of the Mississippi, where they were easily thrown 
into companionship with the French packmen, as far north as 
the Falls of St. Anthony and higher up. Such intercourse 
boded no good to the English. 

Unfortunately, Major Rogers, their commandant at Mack- 
inac, was hardly a man to be trusted. He had become badly in 
debt to the traders, and had schemes of detaching that post 
from Canadian control and using it to secure w^elcome and 
advancement from the French. This movement demoralized the 
Indians, and Gage soon found it necessary to instruct Johnson 
to use his interpreters to ensnare the traitor, and in December, 
1767, he was arrested for treason. 

The effect of Rogers's disaffection upon the Indians was to 
be dreaded, as convincing them of the weakness of the English 
rule and the ultimate return of the French domination. There 



THE AMERICAN BOTTOM. 25 

were too apparent grounds for believing in the hold which the 
French still had upon the Indians. Johnson assured Gage that 
the savages were as fond as ever of the French. " Whatever 
they ardently wish for, it is natural for them to expect even 
after several disappointments," said that observer. It seemed 
to the French themselves that the savages greatly desired a 
reinstatement of the French power. 

To unsettle this savage regard for their rivals and to rehabili- 
tate this Indian trade, so that the seaboard could profit by it, 
was now a vital question with the English. The obvious move- 
ment was to make the Illinois country subservient to such a. pur- 
pose, just as the French in the earlier days had always made 
it. The author of a tract on The Expediency of securing our 
American Colonies hy settlinc/ the Country adjoining the River 
Jlississi/>pi had, as early as 17G3, ])ointed out how the forks of 
the Mississippi, as its junction with the Ohio was termed, cover- 
ing a region stretching to the Illinois, was '' the most necessary 
l^lace of any in America, — the key of all the inland parts." 
Gage, on April 3, 1767, wrote to Shelburne that it was desir- 
able to have an English fort at this point in order to control 
the dependent country : and just before Captain Harry Gordon, 
Chief Engineer of North America, had pointed out the situation 
of Fort Massac as admirable for that purpose. Beck, in his 
Gazetteer (1823), points out that the first settlements at Cahokia 
and Kaskaskia were made in the most fertile land in Illinois. 
They were upon a piece of alluvial land, later known as the 
American Bottom, whose existing aboriginal mounds showed 
that it had long before supported an affluent ])o])ulation. This 
region, lying between a range of bluffs and the river, extended 
north from Kaskaskia for a hundred miles, and contained an 
area of about five hundred and twenty square miles. It was 
mostly a treeless prairie, but there was a fringe of heavy timber 
along the river. Its very fertility rendered it miasmatic, but 
steady cultivation had impx-oved its salubriousness. As an 
agricultural region, Hutchins called it " of a superior soil to 
any other part of North America " that he had seen. Carver 
tells us that this was the general reputation which the country 
bore. 

During the years immediately following the peace, and par- 
ticularly before the cession of the trans-Mississippi country to 



26 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

Spain was known, there had been some confusion among the 
population, owing- to a general exodus of the French across the 
Mississippi. The village neighboring to Fort Chartres had 
become almost depopulated in this way, and the flight of its 
inhabitants was not altogether untimely, in view of the speedy 
encroachments which the current of the river was making on 
the soil. The English a little later (1772) found it necessary 
to abandon Fort Chartres, " the most commodious and best 
built fort in North America," as Pittman called it, because the 
river had undermined its walls in places. To understand how 
the very qualities which rendered this bottom-land so rich 
made it also unstable, we find this fort, when it was rebuilt in 
1756, two miles inland ; at the time we are now considering, 
sixteen years later, it was partly washed away, while to-day the 
ruined magazine and the ragged walls are again more than a 
mile from the river. In 1772, a new defense, called Fort Gage, 
was built on the bluff opposite Kaskaskia, and thither the Eng- 
lish garrison was transferred. There was need of it, if England 
was to give the region the protection it needed. 

The Cherokees and Chickasaws, not long before, had invaded 
the country and eonunitted depredations in the neighborhood 
of Kaskaskia. The native defenders, the tribes of the Illinois, 
had at this period lost their vigor. Early in 1768, or at least 
in time for Gage to have heard of it in New York in the sum- 
mer of that year, — and this evidence seems better than what 
induced Pai'kman to put it a year later, — Pontiac had been 
treacherously killed in Cahokia. " The French at Illinois and 
Post Vincent," says Gage (July 15, 1768), " complain of our 
setting the Cherokees and Chickasaws to molest them, and that 
the death of Pontiac, committed by a Peorie of the Illinois, 
and believed to have been excited by the English to that action, 
had drawn many of the Ottawas and other northern Indians 
towards their country to revenge his death." Johnson, from 
rei)orts which reached him, feared, as a consequence, another 
outbreak like the Pontiac war. But the Illinois were the only 
sufferers, and their misfortunes lay them open to the revenge 
of the Pottawattamies, the Winnebagoes, and the Kickapoos, 
and there was a direful scene of suffering at Starved Rock. To 
such " a poor, debauched, and dastardly " condition had these 
people come, who in La Salle's time had crossed from the west- 



THE ILLINOIS TRIBES. 



27 




KASKASKIA AND CAHOKIA AND THE AMERICAN BOTTOM. 



ern bank of the Mississip])i and confronted the Iro(inois, that 
Hntchins describes them as too indolent to obtain skins enough 
to barter for clothing. 

IMttnian's account of them is much to the same effect. lie 
counts their male adults at three hundred and fifty, whom it 



28 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

is a mockery to call warriors. If they slunk before the braver 
tribes towards the Wisconsin, they had, in the Miami confeder- 
acy, other warlike neighbors to repress them on the side of the 
Wabash. The white population of all this country, including 
that at Vincennes, was perhaps not far from two thousand, 
consisting almost wholly of French, who from ties with the 
Indians, or from habits of content, had not sought to escape the 
English rule, though they objected to serve as British militia. 
Perhaps English observers exaggerated their social degradation, 
but Lieutenant Eraser, who had just been among them, called 
them debauched and every way disgraced by drunken habits. 

Such was the country, in climate, soil, and denizen, white and 
red, which was now attracting attention. Sir William Johnson 
was writing of its capabilities to the Board of Trade, and di- 
recting thither the notice of Conway. The reasons which he 
urged for making it the seat of a British colony were that an 
English population would prevent the practice promoted by 
the four hundred French families already there, of sending furs 
down to New Orleans. The commander at Fort Chartres had 
been unsuccessful in prohibiting this, and the Spanish traders 
went with impunity up the Illinois and Wabash rivers. Gen- 
eral Gage asked Don Ulloa at New Orleans to prevent this, and 
a little later ordered armed boats to patrol the river to inter- 
cept the outlaws. Johnson's plan included the maintaining of 
English posts on the east bank of the Mississippi, the acquir- 
ing lands of the Indians and settling soldiers upon them, and 
the creation of a land company, which would agree to settle an 
occupant on every hundred acres. 

Meanwhile, General Phineas Lyman, in behalf of some offi- 
cers of the late war, was writing to Shelburne, and developing 
schemes by which he would establish colonies all along the 
Mississippi from western Florida to the Falls of St. Anthony. 

The active mind of Haldimand worked over, as we shall see, 
the problem in his quarters at Pensacola, and he sent a plan to 
Gage, now in New York, who forwarded it to the home govern- 
ment. This plan outlined a military colony at the Natchez, 
and advocated the making of small grants of land to the Louisi- 
ana French along the river, in order to induce them to settle 
upon them and so escape a servitude to the Spanish, which had 
now become their palpable fate. 



I 



NEW ORLEANS. 29 

To understand the attitude of Haldimand's mind and the con- 
ditions which prevailed in the lower j^arts of the Mississippi, it 
is necessary to revert to the influences which the secret treaty 
of 1763 were exerting in that region. 

New Orleans at this time contained, within a stockade having 
a circuit of about two and a half miles, not far from four thou- 
sand souls. This population for the most j^art was living in 
some seven or eight hundred dwellings, standing as a rule in 
gardens of their own. These houses, built of timber, with brick 
filling, were of a single floor, elevated about eight feet from the 
soil so as to furnish storage below. The wet ground, in fact, 
did not admit of digging cellars. The occupants of the out- 
skirts were mostly Germans and Acadians, scattered along the 
river on both sides, nearly to the Iberville. Including these, 
the entire population of the town and its dependencies may 
have reached near ten thousand souls. In seasons of high water 
they were all living in some danger of inundation, for the rush- 
ing river at such times was only kept to its channel by an 
unsubstantial levee, wdiich extended for about fifty miles up and 
down its banks. 

Several travelers have left us their observations of New 
Orleans at a period just subsequent to the Peace of Paris. 

Captain de Pages, of the French navy, whom we have already 
mentioned, speaks of seeing Tonicas and Choctaws in the town, 
bringing fish, fruit, and game to barter for brandy and trinkets. 
The more active merchants, however, were rarely in the town 
except to replenish their supplies, and were usually up the river 
in search of peltry. They oftener than otherwise wintered on 
the St. Francis River, which entered the Mississippi on the 
western side, ninety miles below the Ohio. From this i)lace 
they sent their furs and salted meats to New Orleans for a 
market. In the season of travel, they moved up the river in 
little flotillas of bateaux, which were generally of about forty 
tons burden, and were manned l)y eighteen or twenty hands. It 
took about three months to row, pole, and warp such crafts 
from New Orleans to the Illinois country, and the l)argemen 
were often obliged at night to guard their camps from the 
attacks of the Chickasaws and other marauders. Arrived at 
the upper waters of the Mississip]u, the packmen scattered 
along the various trails. They were found on the higher reaches 



30 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

of the Missouri, and were known to be in the habit of ascend- 
ing that river three and four hundred leagues, gathering that 
trade of which the English were now so covetous. They went 
among the Sioux in the region west of Lake Superior. They 
even turned east towards Canada, and are thought to have 
instigated the savages of the Great Lakes to hostile demonstra- 
tions against the English. AVe find more or less contemporary 
testimony on these points in such observers as Lieutenant John 
Thomas, of the Royal Artillery, and Philip Pittman, who had 
passed from the Illinois region down the valley to Pensacola. 
But in March, 1764, a Colonel Robertson, who had just arrived 
at New York from New Orleans, assured Gage that the French 
in Louisiana were certainly not instigating the upper tribes 
against Detroit. 

Pensacola was now become the centre of English interests on 
the Gulf shore, and had attained a prominence that it never had, 
possessed under the Spanish rule. It had been promptly occu- 
pied by the English in 1763. The post then consisted of a high 
stockade, inclosing some miserable houses, and there were a few 
equally dismal habitations without the defenses. Such was the 
place where Bouquet, now a brigadier, had been put in com- 
mand in August, 1765, as a fit field for his recognized abilities, 
and where the southern fever was in a few d|iys to cut short a 
brilliant career. Whoever the commander, Pensacola was des- 
tined to be the centre from which the English were to control, 
as best they could, the conflicting interests of the neighbor- 
ing tribes, and gain what advantage was possible from their 
treaty rights of navigation along the Mississippi. The prin- 
cipal savage peoples within the radius of this influence were the 
Choctaws, the Creeks, and the Chickasaws, and they presented 
some perplexing problems. The Choctaws were for a time dis- 
tracted by the rival solicitations of the French and English 
and warring with the Chickasaws ; but this conflict the English 
after a while checked, only to turn the Choctaws against the 
Creeks, now angry with the English traders, and discontented 
with the absence of gifts, which the French had taught them 
to expect of Europeans. In their restless condition they were 
marauding along the English borders, but they promptly dis- 
owned their young warriors if they were apprehended, — per- 



32 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

haps more promptW than the English disowned the " crackers," 
as the lawless whites of the borders were called. The English 
^vould have been glad to play off some o£ the lesser tribes 
against both Choctaws and Creeks, but the Alibamons were 
flying north to escape the toils. The English even thought of 
luring the Natchez, because of their hatred of the French, to 
cross the Mississippi and stand as a barrier against their savage 
neighbors ; but the scheme was hardly practicable. The Creeks 
growing troublesome, Governor Johnston, who had succeeded 
Bouquet, had determined, in October, 1766, to attack them, 
while Gao'e was advising that Johnston should draw in for 
safety his distant garrisons. When Johnston's purpose was 
known to the home government, it dreaded a general uprising 
of the tribes, and recalled him for his rashness. Haldimand 
was now ordered to take his place, and enforce a more peaceful 
policy. So one of the first matters to which the new governor, 
on his arrival early in 1767, directed his attention was how 
to divert from the lower Miss'issippi the trade of the Illinois 
country. 

The obvious solution of this problem was to establish a post 
on the Mississijjpi, just north of the Iljerville Eiver, and then 
deepen the channel of that stream, so as to render its naviga- 
tion easy and at all times certain. 

This would carry the stream of traffic through Lake Pont- 
chartrain to Mississij^jji Sound, and on to Mobile and Pensa- 
cola, which might thus be made to flourish at the expense of 
New Orleans. Already in March, 1767, Gage at New York 
had received reports of measures looking to this end, and had 
approved tliem. 

The engineering feat was not an easy one, and its difficulties 
were palpable. When the Mississippi was at a low stage, the 
bed of the Iberville was twelve feet above it ; in the season of 
freshets it was as much or more below, but the current was 
then all the more obstructed by driftwood. Three years before 
(1764), the English had made one futile attempt to divert the 
scanty flow of the great river so as to deepen the lesser channel. 
It now happened that before any serious effort could be made 
to attack the difficulty afresh, a new policy of strengthening 
the English garrisons at St. Augustine, INIobile, and Pensacola, 
in view of needing the troops to quell disturbances now brew- 



THE SPANIARDS IX LOUISIANA. 33 

iiig in New England and likely to spread south, drew away the 
troops at the mouth of the Iberville and at the Natchez. On 
this policy Haldimand and the civil governor were at variance, 
and the general reported to Gage not only the bad effect on 
the Indians of the evacuation of the Mississippi posts, but the 
detriment it would prove to the trade which they had hoped to 
create. Aubry, the French governor at New Orleans, had not 
been unmindfid of these events, and they gave him some relief 
from his anxieties as respects his English neighbors. 

The hope of the English to possess New Orleans by some 
device had not been out of sight, even when the Iberville pro- 
ject seemed promising, for the outlet of the Mississippi was 
looked to as a means of lessenin"- the financial obliaations of 
the colonies to the mother country, which had accumulated 
between 1756 and 17(35 to near £11,000,000. There was a 
prosi)ect, if the mouth of that river was left in the hands of 
the French, that they would outi'ival the English in tobacco 
as they had in sugar, and cotton was just beginning to be an 
export from New Orleans. John Thomas, in his record of 
events, is confident that fifteen hundred English and two hun- 
dred Indian auxiliaries could conquer Louisiana. Haldimand 
was questioned by Gage as to the feasibility of such an effort. 
That officer thought it not a difficult task, and counted u])oii 
the readiness of the French inhabitants to throw themselves on 
the English side in case of a rupture with the Spaniards, which 
now seemed probable. 

It is necessary to go l)ack a little to see how this condition 
of a French antagonism to Spain had become supposable. At 
the beginning of 1764, Gage in New York had learned of the 
proposed change of masters in New Orleans, which had been 
assured by the secret treaty of 1763. '" I have a very extraor- 
dinary ])iece of good news to tell you," Gage wrote to John- 
son, .Januar}^ 23, "•which is that the French are to cede all 
Louisiana to the king of Spain, by whicli we shall get rid of 
a most troul)lesome neighbor and the continent be no longer 
embroiled with their intrigues. The French minister has de- 
clared this to Mr. Neville, with the compliment that it was 
done purely to avoid future disputes and quarrels with the 
English nation. I don't know whether they are yet acquainted 



34 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

with these resokitions on the Mississippi." They were not. 
The secret provisions for a transfer were not known in New 
Orleans till October, and a few months later, February 4, 1765, 
crAbbadie, the French govei-nor, died, and Aubry became the 
acting governor. In the following summer, he and the council 
received word from Havana that a Spanish commandant had 
been appointed, and would soon present himself at New Orleans. 
Tliis official was Antonio de Ulloa, now a man of nearly fifty, 
who had acquired some name by being associated with a scien- 
tific expedition to the equator to measure the arc of the me- 
ridian. On March 5, 1766, he arrived at New Orleans and 
became aware of a strong opposition among the Louisianians 
to the intended transfer. 

Some time before, there had been a large meeting in New 
Orleans, which resulted in a leading merchant — Milhet by 
name — being sent to France in the hope of inducing the 
government to revoke the treaty of cession. This messenger- 
found Bienville in Paris, then a man of eighty-five, and wit i 
him he sought an audience of the king, which Choiseul man- 
aged to avert. It was a cherished hope of that minister, that 
the time was coming when France could be avenged upon Eng- 
land for all she had lost. In 1764-66, he had kept a spy. 
Monsieur Beaulieu, in the English colonies watching for events 
that he could take advantage of. Some time afterwards we know 
that De Kalb, on January 12, 1768, ai*rived in Philadeli)hia, to 
see how nearly ripe the colonial discontent was for that break 
with the mother country which Turgot believed imminent. 
The minister was again actuated by this same hope a little 
later, when Spain had secured herself at New Orleans, and he 
pointed out that her true policy was not to try to colonize 
Louisiana, for which she had no aptness, but to rule her new 
province so liberally, even to fostering it as a republic, that the 
Americans would be lured by sympathy to declare their own 
independence, — a movement that Choiseul had no hesitation 
in desiring at whatever cost. 

It seemed at first as if Ulloa was going to impede such a 
tendency by acts of conciliation towards the unwilling French, 
but the atmosphere soon changed. He had brought with him 
two companies of infantry, but they were not sufficient to 
enforce authority, and it was evident that the French — neither 



ULLOA AND AUBRY. 35 

troops nor populace — would tamely submit to a change of 
flag. Indeed, Aubry was apparently the only friend whom the 
Spanish governor had found. Ulloa had tried in various ways 
to appease the opposition, and in May, 17G6, he had issued a 
conciliatory order, permitting continued intercourse with the 
French West Indies ; but within four months all such commu- 
nication was interdicted. 

Thus the situation became critical. The French were doubt- 
less unfortunate ; and Ulloa, put to the test, was shown to be 
destitute of tact, and in some acts seemed inhuman. Aubry 
was soon convinced of the Spaniard's inability to govern. With 
a hostile population of six thousand, not including blacks, — 
for Ulloa had ordered a census and obtained some definite fig- 
ures, — it was clearly imprudent for him to set up his authority 
without further communication with his government. Aiibry 
had had definite instructions (April 20, 1766) to cede the 
province, and in his intercourse with Ulloa was complacent, if 
not time-serving ; but he was without the hardihood of char- 
acter needed in such an emergency, either to make Ulloa banish 
liis indecision, or to control the French. Accordingly, when 
Ulloa felt it prudent to retire to the Balize, Aubry soon foUowed 
him. Here the two made a documentary recoixl of the transfer 
of government, but there was not the courage to publish it. 
Ulloa now established his headquarters on the opposite side 
of the stream from the French fort, which, in the growing of 
the delta seaward, was now two miles from the Gulf, when, in 
1734, it had been built directly upon the open water. At that 
time, the island which Ulloa now occupied did not exist. 

In December, 1767, Jean Milhet returned from France, and 
declared that there was to be no effect fi-om the colony's pi-o- 
test. The immediate result was that Aubry and Ulloa agreed 
upon a plan of joint rule till their European masters could 
intei'pose more effectively. Detachments were now sent up the 
river to establish three posts, the better to patrol the river and 
to be prepared for decisive action, and when the Spaniards 
deserted from Ulloa's regiments, French were enlisted to take 
their places. One of these detachments was at the mouth of 
the Iberville, opposite the position which the Englisli later 
tried to occupy. Another was opposite Natchez, and a third 
was at the mouth of the Missouri, All these posts were distinct 



36 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

obstacles to the English project of securing the trans-Mississippi 
trade ; but the forts were too far apart for mutual support in 
any contest with the English. Gage had already determined on 
a stricter observation of the river, and had ordered the arrest 
of all French traders found on its eastern banks ; and before 
August, 1768, he had sent a message to Ulloa of his purpose. 

Events which were taking place in Boston — royal regiments 
landing under cover of shotted guns — prefigured the coming- 
revolution of the English colonies, and the tidings were to carry 
joy to Choiseul's heart. A fear of this outbreak had necessi- 
tated, as we have seen, the evacuation of the British posts on 
the Mississippi, and it had proved the best protection of the 
Spaniards. The attitude which the Louisianians were now 
assuming showed doubtless some of that revolutionary fervor 
which characterized the New England patriots. Indeed, Aubry 
suspected that it was not so much devotion to France as a 
desire for independence which was now impelling the growing 
discontent. He even informed his government that some of 
the imprudences of Ulloa might drive a part, at least, of the 
French over the river to the protection of the English flag. 

The stubbornness of Ulloa brought a natural result when, in 
October, 1768, a conspiracy organized in secrecy, in which some 
of the leading colonists were concerned, broke forth. The crisis 
was reached. Ulloa fled to a frigate in the river, and before 
the mouth was closed the Supreme Council decreed, notwith- 
standing Aubry's protest, that the Spaniards must leave. On 
October 31, Ulloa sailed out of the river, and on December 4, 
1768, he announced the result to Grimaldi, the Spanish minister. 

Such a daring act on the part of the council needed explana- 
tion, and this body dispatched a messenger to Paris to nuike a 
representation. Ulloa was in advance, and when his repoi-t was 
made known in France, it was not an unwelcome thought to 
the enemies of England that revolutions were contagious, and 
that the English colonies were growing ripe for the infection. 
Though such encouraging sentiments were lacking, the French 
government itself proved steadfast in their obligations with 
Spain. 

As soon as the Louisianians became aware by a return mes- 
sage that there was no hope in Paris, they turned to the English 
in Florida for sympathy and aid, but got none. 



O'REILLY IN NEW ORLEANS. 37 

Tiie anxious days slipped on, and in July, 1769, it was known 
in New Orleans that O'Keilly, an Irish Catholic in the Spanish 
service, with a fleet at his back, had arrived at the Balize. 
The next day, this Spanish commander sent to the town instruc- 
tions committed to him for Aubry. He informed the French 
governor at the same time of his purpose to assume command, 
whatever obstacles were interposed. He had three thousand 
troops to add weight to his determination. 

The town grew excited over the news. White cockades 
appeared on the streets. There was prospect of trouble. La 
Freniere, and other leaders of the conspiracy which had sent 
Ulloa off, recognized the gravity of the situation, and success- 
fully exei'ted themselves to allay the excitement. To help 
restore confidence, these conspirators, now more prudent, went 
down the river to welcome the new governor. 

The way seemed open for a peaceful occupation. It was 
hoped the past would be forgotten. But appearances were 
ensnaring. O'Reilly reached the town on August 17, and on 
the next day Aubry made a formal surrender. 

The purpose of O'Keilly was for a brief period cloaked ; but 
in the end La Freniere and the other conspirators were seized 
and executed, while still others were imprisoned. By the latter 
part of November, 1769, the new government was in possession 
everywhere. O'Reilly's conduct was doubtless shaped by his 
instructions, and Jay, who later knew him in Spain, thought 
him " a man of excellent abilities, and possessed of great know- 
ledge of men as well as of thinsfs." 

O'Reilly had found the English merchants in complete con- 
trol of the commerce of New Orleans, and he took immediate 
measures to dispossess them, and to cut off English communi- 
cations across the Mississippi. As soon as Gage had heard of 
O'Reilly's success, he congratulated himself that if he could 
only spread the tidings among the Western Indians, he could 
effectually dispel their hopes of further French aid. 

While the Spaniards were thus endeavoring to form a barrier 
against the English, they were dis])atching messages to the 
Indians of Florida, — a region to whose loss, under the treaty 
of 1763, they had not become reconciled. These added new 
difficulties to those which beset the loyal officers of the British 



38 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

crown all along the Gnlf and Atlantic coast. They had little 
time to think further of the forcible acquisition of New Orleans, 
for the prowling savages were hanging about their interior 
posts, so as to compel their abandonment, one by one. The 
Tombigbee fort was evacuated in the spring of 1768, and not 
an armed station now protected the English traders in the 
upper country. A wavering and sinister policy, as Adair com- 
plains, had well-nigh alienated all the neighboring tribes from 
the English, and made it a common reproach among them to 
be an ally of that treacherous race which sold firearms to friend 
and foe alike. 

Meanwhile the new political commotions in the older English 
colonies were checking the unfolding of English power on the 
Ohio and by the Illinois. To such projects we must now turn. 

Governor Franklin of New Jersey and Sir William Johnson, 
feeling with their Tory instincts full confidence in the mainte- 
nance of the royal power on the seaboard, were together plan- 
ning the establishment of a colony in the Illinois region. To 
advance their schemes. Sir William addressed the ministers and 
Governor Franklin wrote to his father, then in London, who, 
from his important services in the recent war, was recognized 
even there as a man of influence. The elder Franklin proved 
an earnest advocate of the new measures, which were not un- 
like in their purpose the project of barrier colonies, to which 
he had committed himself at the time of the Albany congress 
in 1754. The expectation at first was to buy needed territory 
from the French settlers, and Franklin marked out for Lord 
Shelburne the limits that were proposed on the small-scale map 
which makes a part of Evans and Pownall's larger sheet. This 
plan of compensation was soon abandoned, and the government 
was petitioned for a grant. General Gage and a body of Phila- 
delphia merchants joined the others in this new memoi'ial. 
Their aim was to acquire a tract of 63,000,000 acres stretching 
from Lake Erie to the Mississippi, and bounded in one direction 
by the Fox and Wisconsin rivers and on the other by the Ohio, 
Wabash, and Miami (Maumee). Against the eastern Hounds 
of the ])roposed colony, and along the Wabash and Miami, lay 
a French population of some five or six hundred, which were 
grouped at Vincennes, and at Forts Ouiatanon and Miami. 




A CORNER .MAP IN EVANS AND POWNALL'S LARGE MAP. 



40 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

These settlers were in the main agricultural, and gave much 
of their labor to the vine ; while they varied life with an occa- 
sional hunting season. They had pined under the change of flag 
much less than the French nearer the Mississippi, and had in 
fact established family ties with the neighboring Indians, which 
served to bind them to the soil, and there was indeed much in 
their country to attract. Wharton had said of it in 1770 : 
"' The Wabash is a beautiful river, with high and upright 
banks, less subject to overflow than any other river (the Ohio 
excepted) in this part of America. It is navigable to Ouiata- 
non, 412 miles, in the spring, summer, and autumn, with bat- 
toes drawing about 3 feet of water. Boats go 197 miles further 
to the Miami carrying place (nine miles)." 

The severest wu-ench to the feelings of the French, whether 
here or along the Mississippi, came with the establishment, 
under orders from Gage, of a court and jury according to Eng- 
lish usage, whither all causes were to be taken. The change 
from the civil law of the French, applied by judges in their 
own villages, was a dismal reminder of their new allegiance to 
a distant master. 

The project of a new colony, which should seek to harmonize 
conflicting interests, give a stable government to the uncertain 
French, and protect the trading body, appealed variously to 
those who were lookers-on or had responsibilities. Some like 
Lord Clare looked to it, as he told Franklin, solely with a view 
to securing the country against a possible revolt of its French 
inhabitants. Such also was, in effect, the opinion held by Haldi- 
mand, studying the problem at Pensacola, and dreaming of the 
reci])rocal interests of his own province and the upper Missis- 
sipi:)i. He had urged his view upon Gage, and had expressed 
the belief that such a post on the Illinois could be made to sus- 
tain itself by agriculture. Shelbiu-ne fell in with the broader 
views which were pressed by Franklin, and so became in a way 
the sponsor of the project when he laid the scheme before the 
Board of Trade in October, 17(36, who, if constant to the views 
which they had expi^essed more than once during the last twenty 
years, might be reasonal)ly expected to favor the project. 

It was held by the s]ionsor and advocates that such a colony 
would raise up a population to demand British manufactures ; 



ENGLISH COLONIAL AIMS. 41 

that by it the fur-trade could be wrested from the French aud 
Spanisli ; that its settlements would serve as a barrier against 
the Indians ; that the country could provision the forts ; and that 
it would be the means of giving a civil government to the French 
people now scattered there, and repining under the martial law. 

Such views, however, availed nothing. The Lords of Trade 
in March, 1TG7, reported adversely on the project. They held 
that such a colony could but poorly answer the end for which 
colonies should be created. A pamphleteer of the time clearly 
defines the views, current not only with the Lords of Trade, but 
with the generally conservative, better-class English subjects. 

" A colony is profitable," says this writer, " according as its 
land is so good, that by a part of the labor of the inhabitants 
bestowed on its cultivation, it yields the necessaries of life 
sufficient for their sustenance ; and by the rest of their labor 
produces staple commodities in such quantity, and of such 
value, as brings for the mother country, in the waj' of com- 
merce and traffic, all manufactures necessary for the proper 
accommodation of the colonists, and for the gradual improve- 
ment of the colony, as tlie number of people increase." Be- 
lieving in such conditions, Hillsborough, the first colonial sec- 
retary, contended that Murray's scheme of extending (Quebec 
to the Mississippi was the only prudent measure. Indeed, in 
his conservative view the object of colonization being " to im- 
prove the commerce, navigation, and manufactures of England, 
upon which her sti-ength and security depend," the creating of 
colonial ])ower distant from the sea, and caiising delay in com- 
munication, was expressly detrimental to public policy and an 
unwarranted charge upon the public treasury. Further there 
seemed, in his judgment, no occasion to annul the proclama- 
tion of 17G3, in order to promote settlements which were cer- 
tain in the end to make their own wares instead of buying them 
from the mother country. Such sweets of commercial inde- 
pendence, once tasted, were sure, he contended, to create a desire 
for political autonomy. Further, he argued, there w^ere no 
])eople to s])are for building up an effective colony, and Ireland, 
in particular, ought not to be depopulated in the interests of 
such a settlement, while the seaboard communities of America 
needed, as he thought, rather to be strengthened than (le])leted. 
In his counter arguments Franklin had depended, not so miich 



42 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. 

upon drawing his colonists from the border settlements, as 
securing them in the more distant plantations like Connecticut; 
and he and many others felt sure that the efforts of the minis- 
try to keep settlements on the Atlantic slope and to increase 
the growth of Florida and the maritime provinces would cer- 
tainly be thwarted by the climatic conditions of those regions. 

To Hillsborough's plea for a restriction of manufactures, 
Shelburne rejDlied that an active people cooped up by the 
mountains was much more likely to engage in handicrafts than 
if allowed to subdue a virgin soil like that beyond the Alle- 
ghanies. Wynne argued the point in his British Empire in 
America (1770). "Great Britain," he says, "a country of 
manufactures without materials ; a trading nation without 
commodities to trade upon ; and a maritime power without 
either naval stores or sufficient material for shipbuilding, could 
not long subsist as an independent state without her colonies." 
He then argues that to secure intervals for the soil to lie 
fallow required, for a country aiming to subsist by agriculture 
alone, that such laborers should have on an average forty or 
fifty acres of land. In fact, some of the seaboard colonies had 
no more than ten or twenty acres to the man. Prohibit such 
colonies from sending their surplus population beyond the 
mountain, and you force them, he said, to live in part by 
manufactures, and prej^are the way for independence. That 
it is not possible to restrain a people hungry for land is indi- 
cated, he further said, in the continual disregard which had 
been shown to the proclamation of 1763. 

No such arguments, however, prevailed, and the ministry 
were supported in their conservative views generally by most 
of the royal governors, and by prerogative men in the colonies. 
The opponents contended that a purely militaiy control of such 
distant regions was best adapted to retain the French settlers 
in subjection. Amherst was urging such establishments, not 
only on the Mississippi, but on the Ohio and at Detroit. 

Early in 1768, the movement lost force, Franklin bowing to 
the will of the ministiy ; but Lyman, who had been a strenuous 
advocate and impatient at the obstacles, had already intimated 
a willingness to proceed without the sanction of the govern- 
ment. More prudent council, however, followed, and the pro- 
ject before long took another shape. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

1767-1774. 

The prohibition of settlement under tlie royal proclamation 
of 17(33, after five years of mingled distrust and indifference, 
had been practically annulled over the greater part of Ken- 
tucky by the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. Washington had 
always under his breath called that edict " a temporary expedi- 
ent to quiet the Indians. It must fall, of course," he said, 
" when the Indians consent to our occupying the lands." In 
anticipation of such consent he had, in 1767, taken into his 
confidence an old acquaintance, Colonel Crawford, who was now 
living on the Youghiogheny. It had been agreed between 
them that Crawford should proceed quietly beyond the Monon- 
gahela as if bound on a hunting expedition, and select and de- 
fine the most desirable lands. The object of secrecy was to 
prevent rivalry, and while Crawford inspected and surveyed the 
lands, Washington was to bear the cost as w^ell as the fees for 
subsequent patenting. He avowed his purpose to secure pre- 
emption of large areas, of compact acreage and as near Pitts- 
burg as possible. Such a frontier service meant not a little 
risk, for the Indians were everywhere jealous of the encroach- 
ments of the whites. Charles Beatty, who at this time was 
traversing the country west of Fort Pitt, encountei-ed the signs 
of devastations at all points, and even the Chippeways were 
known to be plundering the bateaux on the Ohio. It was one 
of the strongest grounds of remonstrance against the royal proc- 
lamation, that it prevented settled ways and police control over 
a region where the government was poAverless to bar out ad- 
venturous and vagrant occupants. The House of Burgesses in 
Virginia were representing to the king that, if settlements were 
not permitted, this over-hill country would become " the resort 
of fugitives and vagabonds, defiers of law and order, who in 



44 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

time might form a body dangerous to the peace and civil gov- 
ernment of this colony." 

The royal proclamation had been a part of the policy of the 
government to strengthen, by turning the current of population 
thither, the newly acquired provinces of Nova Scotia and the 
Floridas. Still the Board of Trade had not yet taken the ad- 
verse stand which it later assumed towards the trans-Alleghany 
movements, and though prepared to check settlements in so 
remote regions as the Illinois country, were not quite ready to 
deny the possibility of a westward extension to the seaboard 
colonies, if made by easy advances beyond the mountains. 

The pioneers were, in fact, well on their march. We have 
seen how, in 1767, their movements had alarmed the Indians, 
and Croghan had tried to quiet the tribes in a conference at 
Fort Pitt in May, 1768. Gage had little confidence in the re- 
sults. " When the proposed limits shall be fixed," he said, " I 
despair not of living long enough to hear that the frontier 
people have transgressed them ; " and there were, he felt, diffi- 
culties ahead in the determination of the Indians not to allow 
settlers on the prescribed lands till they were paid for them. 
Johnson, while he was arranging for the gathering of the tribes 
at Fort Stanwix in the aiitumn of that year, had been fearful 
lest Colonel Cresap's purchasing Indian lands near the Gi'een- 
lirier River, during the previous season, would disturb the tribes. 
But the daring hiuiters had gone much farther west. James 
Smith, now a man of thirty, who had passed his early manhood 
in captivity among the savages, was at this date spending eleven 
months in coursing the valleys of the Cherokee and Cumber- 
land rivers, — the earliest, perhaps, except one Henry Scrag- 
gins, a hunter, to traverse this region. William Bean and his 
family had built a hut on a branch of the Watauga, — the first 
permanent habitation in the northeast corner of the modern 
Tennessee. Further south, James Harrod and Michael Stover 
had ventured to the neighborhood of the modern Nashville. 

But fate was playing with a more famous name. The promi- 
nence which Daniel Boone maintains in this western story is 
due to his own recitals as preserved by his contemporaries. 
The honest habit of his talk is not completely hidden in the 
ambitious tone which Filson has given to Boone's language, in 
his early account of Kentucky. Boone's rugged, but tender 



DANIEL BOONE. 45 

personality was hard to shroud. We see his tall and slender 
tigure, too muscular to be gaunt. His eyes idealized his head. 
He was old enough at five-and-thirty for a ripened manhood 
to make him thoughtful. His experience had both toughened 
his sinews and made his senses alert. Any emergency brought 




DAMEL BOONE. 



him well-nigh to the normal perfection of a man. His kind- 
ness draws us to him. His audacity makes us as confident as 
himself. Naturally, what we know of him are glim])ses at his 
best, but we imagine for a background the dreary monotony of 
the wilderness. Such a character becomes subdued to the land- 
scape about his figure. His fringed hunting-shirt, belted so that 



46 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

its ample folds carried his food, may be ragged ; his leggings 
may be tattered by the brush ; his moccasins cut by the ledge ; 
his knife clotted with the blood of a wolf ; but the rich copse 
and the bounding elk share our scrutiny with his person, and we 
look to the canopy of magnolia, laurel, and ash, to the spread 
of the buckeye and graceful catalpa, to the foaming stream and 
the limestone vagaries, — and all that the man stands for in 
bravery and constancy is mated with the enchantments of 
nature. 

John Finlay, a trader from North Carolina, had before this 
th ridded the Cumberland Gap, and trudged on to the striking 
scenes on the Kentucky River. Impressed with the country, 
he had returned to the banks of the Yadkin, and had there 
imbued Boone with a desire to go thither too. The two, with 
some companions, started to make a new trial of the region. 
It was in the later spring of 1769 that Boone with James Rob- 
ertson, a young Scotch-Irishman, stood on a mountain path and 
looked down upon the rapid flow of the Watauga, winding in 
its rich valley, two thousand feet above the sea. We shall 
see that this first sight of the vale of the Watauga was not 
forgotten by Robertson and Boone. Two years' further wander- 
ing beyond, amid newer delights in the landscape, carried them 
back to the Yadkin valley in the spring of 1771, with instant 
purposes and resolves. 

While these tentative efforts were making by wandering 
hunter and trader, projects of larger scope were developing. 
In 1769, Dr. Lee of Virginia, with thirty-two other Americans, 
— Washington cooperating, — and two Londoners, were organ- 
ized as the Mississippi Company, and were petitioning the 
crown for a grant of some back lands to the extent of two and 
a half million acres. Gage, who was watching the movement, 
advised (November 9, 1769) that the new province be put on 
a military basis, as a barrier between the present provinces and 
the Indians. Lee's application was in effect pigeon-holed by 
the Board of Trade, while, under other influences, a better rec- 
ognition was made of a rival movement. This was a project of 
speculators, mostly Americans from north of the Potomac, — 
a combination not unlikely to incite the jealousy of the Virgin- 
ians. The petitioners included among them a London banker, 



THE WALPOLE COMPANY. , 47 

Thomas Walpole by name, who was so put in the front of the 
neo-otiations that his name became attached to the scheme. 
Franklin and Governor Pownall were the two most conspicuous 
advocates from the colonies. The stock of the company was 
divided into seventy-two shares.' Pownall intended that the 
government of the new colony should be modeled upon the 
charter of Massachusetts, whose workings he had known. The 
company craved permission to buy of the Indians two million 
four hundred thousand acres of land, situated between latitude 
38° and 42°. In general terms, the tract they desired lay west 
of the AUeghanies and south of the Ohio, and above the bound- 
ary of North Carolina. It was bounded on the west by a line 
drawn from the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Scioto to Cum- 
berland Gap. These limits covered the tract called " Indiana," 
which the traders had bargained for at Fort Stanwix in recom- 
pense for their losses in tlxe Pontiac war. These sufferers now 
petitioned the king to be otherwise recompensed. The bounds 
also embraced the patent of the old Ohio Company, and it was a 
2)oint of grievance with the members of this older company that 
the new organization shoidd be " indebted to discoveries made 
at the expense of the Ohio Company." Colonel George Mercer, 
who was in London watching the interests of the Ohio Com- 
pany, failing to receive instruction for which he had apjdied, 
finally agreed, on his own responsibility, to merge that com- 
pany's interest in the new jjroject, so that the old Virginia 
claimants received a thirty-sixth part of the shares in the Wal- 
pole Company. By the end of that year (1770), Colonel 
Mercer wrote to Washington that he had prevailed upon the 
new company to allow out of their intended grant two hundred 
tliousand acres, which, under a proclamation by Governor 
Dinwiddie, had been granted to Washington and the soldiers 
who served with him in the opening campaign of the recent war. 

By these measures there was gained a certain solidarity of 
interest, needful in negotiating with the government. An 
o])position to the project, not unexpected, as in the contest for 
the Illinois colony, was headed by the colonial minister. 

Lord Hillsborough — representing under Lord North a Tory 
govei-nment destined to last for nearly a half century — ^made 
an adverse report to the king in council on behalf of tlie 
Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. Tliis report enforced 



48 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

what was called the " two capital objects " of the royal procla- 
mation. These were, first, to keep the colonists within reach of 
the trade of the mother country, and, second, to hold them in 
due subjection. Aiiy permission to settle the reserved Indian 
territory would be detrimental to these aims. The report was, I 
of course, as we see it now, a failure to discern the inevitable 
expansion of the British people. As the contest moved on, no 
one in the discussion warmed with the throes of prescience more 
effectively than Edmund Burke. '* Many of the people in the 
back settlements," he said, '' are already little attached to par- 
ticular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachians. 
From thence," he went on to say, with scant knowledge of the 
country, "' they behold an immense plain, one vast, rich, level 
meadow." He intimated that such a population, if alienated, 
might turn upon the oppressor. They could elude any police 
in flying from section to section, if grants were denied them. 
Such indei3endence, he said, "" would be the hapless result of aii 
endeavor to keep, as a lair of wild beasts, that earth which God 
by an express charter had given to the children of men." There 
happened, when he was speaking upon the point in Parliament, 
to be a season of want among the English communities. He 
used it with effect. " The scarcity which you have felt would 
have been a devastating famine, if this child of your old age, ■ 
with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youth- ' 
ful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent." At 
another moment, making it the occasion for a graceful compli- 
ment to Lord Bathurst, as having a memory to cover the inter- 
val, Burke reminded the House that in 1772 the trade of 
England with the American colonies alone was nearly what it 
had been in 1704 with the entire world. 

Hillsborough said that the timely supplies to which Burke 
referred were practically interdicted by the distance and by the 
tardy service of transportation over the mountains. It was 
asserted, in reply, that produce could be carried from the Ohio 
country by the river, and over the passes to tide-water at Alex- 
andria, cheaper than it could be hauled from Northampton to 
London. Flour, beef, and naval stores could be floated down 
the Ohio to Florida and the West Indies easier than they could 
be taken to such markets from New York or Philadelphia ; and 
if forwarded by river and sea to those ports from the Ohio, it 



ADVANCE OF SETTLERS. 49 

would cost but half the expense of land carriage. It was said 
that to go by sea from Philadelphia to Pensacola took a month, 
and it took no longer by the river from Pittsburg. The Ohio, 
said Franklin, is navigable for large boats at all times, and from 
January to April it can cany vessels of large tonnage. Since 
the war, he added, the distance by a new road from Fort Cum- 
berland to navigable water over the mountains has been reduced 
from seventy to forty miles. Thus easy is it, he reasoned, to 
put this temperate and much-producing region into close com- 
munication with the sea, — a region that has its silkworm and 
the mulberry, flax and cotton, for the manufacturer, hemp and 
iron for naval stores, and grapes and tobacco for the solaces 
of life. 

Xo such statements availed, however, to swerve Hillsboroxigh 
from his position. Lord Dunmore did much to strengthen the 
oi)position when he wrote from Virginia that any such grant 
would be sure to bring on an Indian war. 

These were two years of uncertainty in London. It seemed 
at times as if the applicants would get their grant, but every 
period of hope was succeeded by another of disheartenment. 
Meanwhile on the Ohio and its tributaries events were going 
on which made the decision less dependent on the government. 
Already in 1770, settlers were moving steadily on, and there 
was a proposal in the air to found a colony on the lands ceded 
at Fort Stanwix and call it Pittsylvania. The packhorse and 
the shirt of jeans, buckskin leggings scraping together with 
lithe steps, were seen and heard everywhere along the route, 
whether by Fort Bedford and Loyalhannon, or by Fort Cum- 
berland and Redstone old fort. Plunging into the shelter of 
the large timber of the Kanawha and its branches, startling the 
elk, the bear, and the wild turkey, often following the beaten 
'' traces " of the buffalo, the pioneers opened of themselves the 
paths which Captain Legge had thought to have done by an 
organized company of axemen. P)lazing a tree near a spring, 
they marked it with a date and the acreage, and established the 
tacitly recognized '• Tomahawk Claim ; " on clearing and plant- 
ing, they established what passed under the designation of a 
" corn title." Sometimes adventurous parties of hunters pushed 
on even so far as the Green River and the mouth of the Cum- 
berland, and wandered about the site of the modern Nashville. 



50 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

The Walpole movement found little favor in Virginia. 
This combination of northern interests ignored the claim of 
Virginia to a western extension under her charter. If this 
expansion was not maintained, her right to give patents of 
this over-mountain domain was lost. Hillsborough, in July, 
1770, had notified the Virginia authorities of the movement, 
but in their reply in October they made no protest, and ac- 
knowledged that "^ when that part of the country shall become 
sufficiently populated, it may be a wise and prudent measure." 
Before it became known that provision had been made to pre- 
serve Dinwiddie's grant to the soldiers of the late war, there 
was a strong feeling of injury in which Washington shared. 
Moreover, the claims of the Cherokees — who were to be ap- 
peased by the recognition, for they had been of late, as Cameron 
the Indian agent discovered, in a hostile mood — had been es- 
poused by Virginia against the pretensions of the Iroquois as 
recognized at Fort Stanwix. 

While the Walpole petition was pending in London, and 
before Mercer's message about the engulfing of the old Ohio 
Company in the new project had been received, Washington 
started west to take for himself a new look at the country. 
He left Mount Vernon on October 5, 1770, and in a little more 
than a week was with Crawford on the Yonghiogheny. Pie 
had various motives, — one was to see land which Crawford 
had already selected for him, another was to understand better 
the difficulties of the portage connecting the Potomac and Ohio, 
so as to further the trade of what he called " a rising empire." 

Near Redstone old fort, at the head of navigation on the 
Monongahela, where for some years the authorities had been 
trying unsuccessfully to oust the settlers, he found that Michael 
Cresap had built himself a house. Here he talked with that 
frontiersman about what he then supposed was the injury to 
his comrades of 1754, in their rights being covered — at least 
to the extent of four fifths — by the proposed Walpole grant. 
He looked upon himself as in some degree — so he had written 
in April to Lord Botetourt — " the representative of the officers 
and soldiers who claim the right to two hundred thousand 
acres of this very land." Settlements at this time had fairly 

Note. — The opposite view of Pittsburg is from the Atlas of Collot's Journey in North America. 



52 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

begun along the Monongahela, and two years later occupancy 
was in full progress, and was stretching on to Laurel Eidge. 
Most of the settlers were coming by the Braddock route, which 
Washington had followed, but a lesser number poured in by 
the Pennsylvania route from Bedford and Ligonier. 

On October 27, 1770, Washington was at Fort Pitt, now 
garrisoned by two companies of Royal Irish. He found rows 
of traders' houses along the Monongahela side, but the most 
active of the packmen were evidently the Pennsylvanians, di- 
verting the trade over the gaps toward Philadelphia, while they 
met the Indians in Virginia territory south of the Ohio. This, 
with the neglect which the petition of the Lees and himself 
had received, could but convince Washington that the intei-ests 
which supported Forbes and Bouquet in preferring a new route 
over the hills, ten years and more ago, were not short-lived. 
These rival agencies were further kept alive by the controversy 
over counter claims to this over-hill country about the forks 
of the Ohio. Everything was favoring the prominence Penn- 
sylvania was now acquiring among the older colonies. From 
1771 to 1773, something like twenty-five thousand Presbyterian 
Scotch-Irish arrived at either Philadelphia or Newcastle, and 
they added greatly to the sturdier stock of the colony. Frank- 
lin, now in England, was considering how the prosperity of the 
colony could be increased by a system of canalizing her rivers. 

This western contest of Pennsylvania with Virginia was an 
evil destined to be surmounted, but during these years when 
Westmoreland County was formed, it proved irritating and even 
dangerous. Both colonies had, after the treaty at Fort Stan- 
wix, been issuing warrants for the same territory, while they 
bid against each other by alternately lowering the selling price. 

Washington, leaving Pittsburg in October, 1770, went with 
a party down the Ohio to the Kanawha, and early in Noveml)er 
he was examining the land about that stream. Returning to 
Pittsburg, he gave an entertainment at an inn in 'that place, 
and here met for the first time a nephew of George Croghan, 
Connolly by name, who, as a creature of Lord Dunmore. be- 
came a few years later notorious in furthering his lordship's 
schemes in this region in opposition to the claims of Pennsyl- 
vania. This land dispute turned upon the meaning to be given 
to the rather impracticable definition of Penn's charter for his 



WASHINGTON'S LANDS. 53 

western bounds, — five degrees west of the Delaware, a stream 
of in-and-out readies. It was of importance for Pennsylvania 
to hold the forks within her jurisdiction, which it could do if 
Pittsburg could be made to lie within a westward curve to 
match a similar bend of the Delaware. To accomplish this, it 
was claimed by Croghan that certain interested parties, work- 
ing with SculFs map of the province, undertook to misplace the 
forks to accommodate that locality to some favoring curve. 
Such an act, if fraudulent, wronged in its consequences the 
new Walpole colony by depriving it of so eligible a site as 
the forks. 

No one since AVeiser's death had been so important a medi- 
ator with the Ohio tribes as Croghan. Gage was writing of 
liini : " Croghan is generous ; gives all he has, and whilst he 
has anything to give the Indians will flock about him.*' The 
new patentees had made it for Croghan's advantage to watch 
their interests at the fcn-ks. He had thought that their lands 
would find purchasers at £10 the hundred acres, and half-penny 
sterling cpxitrent. When he had offered some of his own lands, 
lying between the Monongahela and Raccoon Creek, to Wash- 
ington, that vigilant speculator refused the chance because of 
the unsettled conditions, both as regards the controverted 
bounds of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and the pending Walpole 
grant, all of which might affect Croghan's title as derived from 
the Indians. Still Washington did not hesitate to add to liis 
own rights under the Dinwiddie proclamation by buying simi- 
lar claims of otliers, and when he died, nearly thirty years 
later, his will shows that he still owned various lots on tlie 
Kanawha, aggregating nearly fourteen thousand acres in four 
])arcels, beside a fine area above the modern Charleston, which 
lie and Andrew Lewis had secured after being attracted by a 
bituminous spring upon it. 

AMien it was known that the Dinwiddie grant was preserved, 
Washington, who had returned to Mount Vernon by the first 
of December, 1770, sent Captain William Crawford in the 
following May to mark out its bounds. Washington's journey 
had convinced him that the wagon road then in use, extending 
about two hundred miles from where it left the Monongahela to 
Alexandria, could be shortened to sixty and perhaps to twenty 
miles, if the Potomac could be made navigable by some system 



54 



THE KENTUCKY REGION. 




-». -a JrLj^atv T'enit.s 



miiiiiil iiimmr- 



S'' 



Note. — This map shows an attempt to define tlie western bounds of Pennsylvania by 



of canalization, such as Franklin was contemplating foi- the 
Susquehanna and its branches. Some such enterprise was 
necessary if Virginia was going to hold a successful rivalry 
with Pennsylvania. No other Virginian added so much per- 
sonal interest to his urgency for the province's behoof, inas- 
much as he eventually held over thirty thousand acres through- 
out the Ohio valley. Washington's interest in the soldier's 
claims was superadded to his own, and he wrote to Dunmore in 
June, 1771, that " the officers and soldiers confide in me to 
transact this business for them." 



FRANKLIN AND HILLSBOROUGH. 



55 



At the same time 
WasLiiigton repre- 
sented that a report 
of the ultimate suc- 
cess of the Walpole 
])etitioners was gain- 
ing ground notwith- 
standing the op})osi- 
tion of the Board of 
Trade. The advo- 
cates had carried the 
question to the king- 
in council, and on 
July 1, 1772, Franklin 
read before that body 
his masterly answer 
to Hillsborough's ob- 
jections. Franklin's 
statement was an em- 
phatic denial of the 
Virginian claim to a 
western extension, for 
he held that the Alle- 
ghanies bounded the 
province, while the 
rights of all the colo- 
nies were derived from 
the Iroquois cession of 
lands, which they had 
obtained by conquest 
from the Shawnees. 
He was in due time answered by George INIason, in behalf of 
the Virginians. The Iroquois argument had been often used 
against the French, and it indicated how the policy of the min- 
istry had changed since the war, tliat it was now necessary to 
use this reasoning against the government's ])osition. 

Treaties with the southern Indians, held at Ilai-dlabor in 
17G8, and again at Lochabar, in South Carolina, October 18, 
had acknowledged that the Cherokees' right to this i-egion to- 
wards the Kanawha was sui)erior to that of the Iroquois, but 




curves corresponding to those of the Delaware River. 



56 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

that tribe got no recognition from Franklin, and a large emi- 
gration had already begun to flow west, looking to the security 
which the treaty of Fort Stanwix gave them. Franklin said 
that he relied, to keep up this western exodus, " on the voluntary 
superflux of the inhabitants of the middle provinces." 

The brothers Zane had built their cabin at the mouth of 
Wheeling Creek, the first white man's habitation, perhaps, 
in that section of the wilderness. Franklin reckoned that not 
less than five thousand families, averaging six heads each, un- 
able to meet the demands of the large landowners east of the 
mountains, had before this sought lands on the Ohio. This 
computation did not include several thousand families whicih 
had passed the gaps, but had tarried within the proposed limits 
of Pennsylvania. 

Among these last, in 1769, had been Zeisberger and his Mo- 
ravians, but in 1772, to escape the troubles of Pennsylvania 
with the Susquehanna Company, they had pushed up the west 
branch of the Susquehanna in search of a new home. We have 
Bishop Ettweln's journal of their flight. Having worshiped 
for the last time in their old church, on June 11, 1772, they be- 
gan their wearisome march. On July 18, "they were climbing 
a precipitous mountain " to a spring, the headwaters of the 
Ohio." " Here," says the bishop, " I lifted up my heart in 
prayer as I looked westward." The band was probably now 
on the north branch of the Mahoning, an affluent of the Alle- 
ghany. They floated down the stream to Beaver Creek, and in 
August they had laid the foundations of a white settlement 
in Ohio, on the " second bottom " of the Tuscarawas valley 
(Muskingum), amid its w^alnuts and sycamores, its cedars, 
locusts, and laurels. 

Such was the varied complexion of the emigration which 
Bui'ke had perceived that it was impossible to withdraw, and 
against which Gage's proclamation was to be so fruitlessly 
directed. Instead of threats, these people needed protection 
and the service of a stable government. This population, as 
Franklin argued, was now become, in part at least, " so ungov- 
erned and lawless " that nothing but some sort of subjection to 
the forms of government could prevent an Indian war. There 
was a tendency, in all considerations of the government about 
America, to delay, but Franklin's urgency and arguments at last 



VANDALIA. 57 

prevailed, and on August 14, 1771, the king, in council, ap- 
proved the Walpole grant. The immediate result was that 
Hillsborough, who in the beginning was desirous of pushing 
the advocates to larger deniantls than they thought prudent, and 
apparently with a purpose in this way to compass their ultimate 
discomfiture, now resigned in disgust. After this, Franklin's 
reply, having accomplished its purpose, disappeared from the 
book-stalls. The effect in America was only the beginning of 
new delays. A message was at once sent to Sir William John- 
son, who instructed Croghan to cause " the different nations 
and tribes to be made acquainted that it was His Majesty's 
pleasure to form a new colony or settlement in Ohio." 

This movement had been sedulously watched in Virginia, not 
only by those who sought the cover of a Virginia patent to 
these same lands, but there is some reason to believe it had 
been observed by Dunmore in no friendly spirit to the claims 
of the soldiers. In the following spring (1773), Dunmore 
and Washington had planned a journey beyond the mountains, 
l>ut the governor went finally alone. In an interview which he 
had with Crawford, the governor promised to issue to Wash- 
ington a patent for lands at the mouth of the Kanawha, " in 
case the new government did not take place before he got 
home." Washington, meanwhile, had found much discourage- 
ment in all his Ohio plans. Crawford was obliged to inform 
him that he had to work hard to keej) squatters off the property 
which had been surveyed for him, and that nothing but hiring 
men constantly to occupy a claim was sufficient to prevent 
intruders building houses upon it. 

We find W^ashington accordingly i)ronqited to turn to other 
claims, which the proclamation of 1763 had reserved for the 
participants in the war, and he thought for a while of the pos- 
sibilities of patenting lands in Florida, amid those '" scorcliing 
and unwholesome heats " of which Franklin had of late been 
writing. 

]Meanwhile, the new Company of the Ohio was nurturing 
larger views, and on May 6, 1773, the king in council extended 
the bounds of the projected government, now spoken of as 
Vandalia, to the line of the Kentucky River. Already the 
In'others McAfee were preparing to take squatters' rights along 
this stream, near where Frankfort now stands, whither the 



58 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

traces of the buffalo had led them, through the uninhabited 
limestone region. Not far from the same time, Captain Wil- 
liam Thompson, an agent for the war claimants in Pennsylvania, 
had sent a party along the Kentucky, and these had reported 
that the lands were the finest they had ever seen, and likely 
soon "to sell at twenty-five shillings an acre." 

The attractive aspect of this country was now well under- 
stood, adorned as it was with broad-leaved trees without under- 
brush, with ripening grass beneath the shade showing blue to 
the distant eye, with the earth teeming from a fertility that 
was constantly nurtured by the decay of the underlying rock, 
and with occasional broad stretches, where the trees had been 
burned and vast herds of buffalo roamed. 

This extension of the grant had rendered the mouth of the 
Kanawha more central than before, and strengthened the 
opinion which Washington had held, that it was the natural 
seat for the new government. Towards the middle of May, it 
became common talk in Pittsburo- that Dunmove had "ranted 
patents for the two hundred thousand acres due to Washington 
and his comrades in the neighborhood of the Kanawha, and 
Croglian wrote to AVharton al)out it and said, " It is creating 
great confusion on the frontier, both among the whites and the 
Indians." The tribes had been taught to look upon the pro- 
jected colony as an alternative which could be turned to their 
advantage in the recompense they expected for their lands. 
The Shawnees, in particular, were aroused, and considered the 
Virginia claims inimical. Frontiersmen so experienced as Dr. 
Walker were advocating an escape from conflict with the 
Cherokees by turning their thoughts to western Florida. This 
large grant of the soldiers, already recognized, as we have seen, 
by the Walpole Company, produced new difficulties by its very 
extent. With an eye to improvements, Washington sought to 
have it surveyed so as to Include as much tillable ground as pos- 
sible. He soon discovered from the re})orts which he received 
that he must secure it in at least twenty different localities, 
unless he was content to include contiguously large unproduc- 
tiv^e mountain areas. It is not easy from Washington's letters 
always to distinguish which of these western lands he had 
patented as a private ventui*e from his claims either under the 
Dinwiddie or the later royal proclamation. By July, 1773, 



BULLITT AND LOUISVILLE. 59 

lie had certainly got such hold of more than twenty thousand 
acres of these Ohio valley lands as to warrant an advertisement 
of them in the Maryland Journal. These lands were among 
the first surveyed, and he describes them as " by the beautiful 
hand of nature almost fit for the scythe." To render them 
more attractive to settlers, he represents that in due time the 
land carriage to them by the jVIonongahela route would be 
reduced to a few miles. 

Just what these lands were is not clear, but it is apparent 
that Washington had secured the favor of the royal governor, 
and was willing to profit by it to the exclusion of his war-time 
comrades, if his caution to Crawford to be discreet in speaking 
of the patents will bear that inference. Dunmore had said 
(September 24) that he did wot intend to make any grants on 
the Ohio under the proclamation of 17G3, but at the same time 
Washington believed the contrary, and that these grants were 
to be made below the Scioto, on the supposition entertained at 
that time that the meridian of the Scioto was to be the western 
limit of Vandalia. 

A certain Ca])tain Thomas Bullitt, in company with one Han- 
cock Taylor, was at this time moving down the Kanawha and 
the Ohio, locating prospective towns on a grant of over a thou- 
sand acres, awarded under the Dinwiddie proclamation, one 
of which included the present Charleston on the Kanawha, 
Bullitt was invested by the College of William and Mary, one 
of its prerogatives, with the authority to approve surveys, and 
had thus become conspicuous in these western movements, 
though there were complaints that when wanted, to give such 
approval, he was not always to be found. He was, as it seems, 
moving on about his own business, and as the summer wore 
on, Taylor and he had separated at the mouth of the Kentucky, 
and while Taylor went u]) that stream, making survey about 
the modern Frankfort, Bullitt went on to the rapids of the 
Ohio, and laid out the plot for a settlement where Louisville 
now stands, the first regular town mapping in Kentucky. The 
spot was not occupied till two years later, though, on a lot above 
the falls, John Cowan had built a log house in 1774. 

Washington had instructed this same Bullitt in September, 
1773, to survey for him a tract of ten thousand acres, as far 
below the Scioto as it ma}'' be necessary to go to get good 



60 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

bottom-lands in oue, two, or three lots. He had already bought 
out the rights of Captain Stobo and Lieutenant Van Braam, 
other soldiers of the recent war, which, added to his own claim 
for five thousand acres, made up the ten thousand held by him 
under the Dinwiddle proclamation. But the destiny of this 
Ohio country turned, it was thought, upon the future of the 
Walpole movement, and the delays in organizing the govern- 
ment of the colony on the spot — Dartmouth seems on May 17, 
1773, to have offered Major Legge the governorship of some 
new colony on the Ohio, with a salary of XI, 000 — were greatly 
embarrassing to Croghan, who at Pittsburg was acting, as we 
have seen, as its agent. 

Haldimand had arrived in New York in July, 1773, to suc- 
ceed Gage in the chief command in North America. He was 
early made aware of the stream of settlers passing down the 
Ohio to the lower parts of that river, and Croghan had reported 
how Bullitt and others were '' going down the river with num- 
bers of people to settle the country, which, they were informed 
by the king's message, was not to be settled." General Brad- 
street had not long before bargained with the Indians for a 
tract of three hundred thousand acres, but the Board of Trade 
had refused confirmation of an act " which cannot be reconciled 
with the spirit and intent of the king's instructions." Haldi- 
mand urged Sir William Johnson to take steps to stop such 
infringements of the royal proclamation, but that Indian agent 
felt himself powerless, with no government on the river to en- 
force the prohibition. This lawless influx had begun here and 
there, as in Bradstreet's case, in private purchases from the 
Indians. Such clouded titles led Chief Justice Marshall, at a 
later day, when the United States succeeded to the royal rights, 
to invalidate claims well earned by the hardships of pioneers. 

By December, 1773, Croghan is representing " the emigra- 
tion as surprising. I am told [he says] that there can't be less 
than sixty thousand souls settled between Pittsburg and the 
mouth of the Ohio, — so that the policy of the people in Eng- 
land in delaying the grant of the new colony, in order to pre- 
vent emigration, answers not their purpose, as it does not 
prevent the settling of the country." 

The delays further produced much discontent among the 



WASHINGTON'S PLANS. 61 

Indians, eager to profit by the settlement. Croghan says that 
these anxious savages flocked by hundreds to Pittsburg, expect- 
ing food and gratuities. The leaders of the colony had jironiised 
their agent what was needed for this hospitable purpose, but 
they forgot their pledge, and Croghan complains that the Indians 
were " eating up what he had gathered for the winter's use 
of his family." To give the presents which were necessary, 
he says, he was forced " to pawn what little plate he had and 
some other valuable things." 

While the company held back and left its agent in this 
unseemly plight, private enterprise revived with the spring 
(1774). During the winter Washington had been consider- 
ing a plan of bringing over two or three hundred Palatines to 
Alexandria, and passing them over the mountains to settle his 
lands. He sought information as to the best measures to that 
end, hoping to " give up indentures and make them freemen 
and tenants " as soon as they could raise a crop of corn. He 
proposed to remit their rent for four years if they took un- 
cleared land, and for two years if there was a house on it and 
five acres cleared. His inquiries did not encourage him. The 
Palatines preferred Pennsylvania with greater religious liberty, 
and did not look kindly upon the Episcopal tithes to be encoun- 
tered under Virginia rule. The restrictive navigation laws 
were also in the way, for these people were to be ship])ed from 
Holland, and outward cargoes for payment must incur charges 
in England by transshipment there. This led Robert Adam to 
suggest that Washington might find it less burdensome to get 
Scotch or Irish, or even convicts and indented servants might 
be more handily found in Baltimore. By spring the obstacles 
seemed no less, and on May 1 we find the scheme laid aside. 
Washington had reckoned that he had land enough for three 
hundred families ; but the outcome of all his plans was that 
two small ])arties of servants and hired men went over the 
mountains, and were soon scattered. 

In April, John Floyd led a surveying party down the Kana- 
wha, and did some surveying for Washington and Patrick 
Henry. Simon Kenton and a party were strolling near the 
lower Blue Licks. Both parties, however, soon discovered 
indications of the rising Indian war. Daring the early summer 



62 THE KENTUCKY REGION. 

(1774), James Harrod and a party of forty laid out in central 
Kentucky the town of Harrodsburg, not the earliest settlement 
of the future State, but the first to have in it, perhaps, the ele- 
ments of perpetuity, with all the initial flourish of a tomahawk 
claim and a patch of corn. 

The year wore out, and nothing was done to relieve the anx- 
iety either of Croghan or the soldiers. The king turned a deaf 
ear to the urgency for dispatching a governor to the new col- 
ony; and Dunmore dallied, as Washington alleges, for "other 
causes" than procrastination in considering the soldiers' grants. 
Political events strained the relations of the mother country and 
the colonies, and in April, 1775, the first gun at Lexington in 
Massachusetts pushed all into the limbo of forgotten things. 
While the news of the conflict near Boston was still fresh in 
London, Walpole did not despair (May 30) of those " better 
times on which the country now depends for its preservation." 



CHAPTER V. 

THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR. 
1774. 

In 1774, there came for the first time a sharp conflict be- 
tween Virginia and the home government as to jurisdiction over 
the territory north of the Ohio. The intei'pretation which Vir- 
ginia had always given to the very obscure definition of her 
bounds in the charter of 1G09 had been long denied by France, 
and when that contested region was wrested from France, the 
peace of 1763 had limited its western extension by the Missis- 
sippi. The royal proclamation, which soon followed, had pre- 
vented the pushing of the settlements thither, but had not given 
it over absolutely to other jurisdiction. Ten years or more 
later, while Virginia was waoino- war against the savages there- 
abouts, to enforce her claim and protect her settled frontiers, 
the British Parliament strove to pnt a limit to her territorial 
pretensions in this direction by giving the Quebec government 
an absolute jurisdiction over the region. There were other 
purposes, both ostensible and latent, in this legislative move- 
ment, which were entered ujion to curb not only Virginia, but 
the other seaboard colonies, in an inevitable westward march. 

Ever since Carleton had been in command in Quebec, he had 
felt the necessity of yielding something more to the French 
Canadians than had been allowed by the capitulation at Mon- 
treal in 1760, and by the acts of 1763. He contended that a 
further concession could alone make them good British sub- 
jects, and that a guarded revival of French law, customs, and 
religion, while placating one hundred and fifty thousand Cath- 
olics of the pi-ovince, — as Carleton counted them, though his 
estimate is probably much too large, — would not seriously 
impair the fortunes of four hundred Protestants, their fellow- 
subjects. In 1770, Carleton had gone to England, leaving in 
his place Cramahe, a Swiss Protestant in the English service. 



64 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR. 

During the four years of his absence, Carleton was in occasional 
consultation with the ministry about what seemed to him some 
needed transformation of the government of the province. This 
consideration was at times affected, and perhaps shaped, by 
petitions of the Canadians, not largely signed, and forwarded 
by Cramahe. They touched the restoration of the French 
laws and a rehabilitation of the Catholic religion. 

While such questions were in abeyance, the revolutionary 
commotions in Boston did not fail to render of doubtful con- 
tinuance the loyalty of the seaboard colonies, now numbering 
jjrobably, according to the most careful estimates, considerably 
under three millions of people. If such disaffection could not 
be stamped out, it became a question of restraining it by terri- 
torial bounds, and covertly if not openly. This danger had 
already delayed the entire fulfillment of the Vandalia project 
south of the Ohio. It was known that there was a tide of 
immigration rolling along the Ohio, and, in spite of the agree- 
ment at Fort Stanwix, threatening its northern banks. It was 
necessary, then, to find some barrier to check the current, lest 
it should buoy up and carry along the seething commotions of 
the seaboard. No such barrier was so obvious as that which the 
French had attempted to maintain in the recent war, — the line 
of the St. Lawrence and the Alleghanies. To make this barrier 
effective, it was necessary to consolidate, as far as possible, the 
region behind it in a single government. Murray and his suc- 
cessor, Carleton, had already urged an extension of their execu- 
tive authority from Quebec westward, and the opportune time 
had come for doing it, under an ostensible plea of regulating the 
fur trade of the region. If the traders were gratified by such 
professions, the debates and remonstrances show that the pro- 
posed reinstatement of the Roman Church and the suppression of 
English law drew out fervent opposition ; and there is, moi-e- 
over, no evidence that the Canadians themselves, as a popula- 
tion, felt any elation over the prospect. This may have been 
due in some part to a latent sympathy among them with the 
revolutionary classes of the older colonies, — a sympathy with 
which Congress, as it turned out, blundered in an attempt to 
deal. 

A new petition from Canada, dated February, 1774, and 
signed by only sixty-five persons, asked for a restoration of the 



VIRGINIA AND PENNSYLVANIA. 05 

" old bounds of Canada," over which the English and French 
had so long disputed, and the ministry in granting- it were 
ensnared into the somewhat ridiculous acknowledgment of what 
they had formerly denied. To restore such limits, however, 
would please the Canadians and some fur traders, and became 
a good cloak for ulterior purposes respecting the seaboard 
colonies. 

The jealousy of New York was aroused, and for a while it 
was uncertain if the western part of that province would not be 
sacrificed to the ministerial purpose. New York owed it to 
Edmund Burke that this territory was saved to its jurisdiction. 

Immediate opposition naturally came from the Penns, whose 
proprietary rights would be curtailed, and from Virginia, whose 
royal governor, interested with many of her peoi)le in land 
schemes in the Illinois country, was already i)reparing for an 
invasion of the territory. The movement for a colony north of 
the Ohio, over which Franklin and Hillsborough had contended, 
had come to naught, much to the relief of Virginia ; but here 
was a project seeking the active sanction of Parliament, and 
likely to thwart any jmrpose which her royal governor might 
have of issuing patents to this ver}'^ land. 

Dunmore, the governor, was a man not easily balked. He 
had already taken possession of Fort Pitt despite the protests 
of Penn, and was determined to hold it as a gate to the over- 
river country of Virginia. This precipitate conduct had alarmed 
Haldimand, the military head of the continent, lest the disti'ac- 
tions of this intercolonial land-dispute should embolden the 
savages to take an advantage. Both sides arrested settlers 
engaged in vindicating their respective colonies, and the trouble 
had become so alarming in the spring of 1774 that surveyors 
of both sides were rushing to the contested region, and plotting 
their claims. 

This dispute, serious enough in itself, was embittered by the 
craft of Connolly, the creature of Dunmore, and comi)licated 
beside by the diversity of individual claims, whether based on 
Indian deeds or tomahawk titles, or on the assertion of might 
against right. The spring of 1774 led to renewed negotiations 
between the colonies in the midst of mutual criminations. 
Penn offered the calculations of Provost Smith of the college 
at Philadelphia and of Dr. Rittenhouse, that Pittsburg was 



66 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR. 

at least six miles within the bounds which he claimed, and in 
May, James Tilghman and Andrew Allen, commissioners sent 
by Penn to Williamsburg, offered as a compromise a curved 
line for the western boundary, parallel to the tortuous course 
of the Delaware. Dunniore insisted that the live degrees of 
longitude should be measured on the 42° parallel, and that 
a meridian boundary line should be run at the western end 
of this measurement. Neither side would yield, and Dunmore 
continued to issue patents covering the controverted area. 

The Indians, observing this antagonism, and disapj^ointed 
that the delay in the organization of the Vandalia colony had 
deprived them of purchase money for their lands, and fearing 
to lose them through occupation by rival claimants, grew 
troublesome along the frontier. One Walter Kelly had hutted 
his family on a creek up the Kanawha, eighty miles from a 
stockade of the Greenbrier Company, which was the nearest 
support. Warnings, which were bringing nearly all the re- 
moter settlers under cover, were neglected, and Kelly's little 
home was devastated by ruthless Shawnees. But such was the 
fearlessness of the frontier that two brothers, Morris by name, 
soon occupied the same spot, and planted a family stock, where 
it flourishes to-day. 

This baleful condition of the border was not altogether 
unwelcome to Dunmore. It gave the color of necessity to a 
proclamation (April 25, 1774) ordering the militia to be in 
readiness. By this force he might intimidate Pennsylvania, 
i:)unish the Indians, and maintain the sovereignty of Virginia 
beyond the Ohio. 

A few score men, land-grabbers and adventurers, had already 
assembled at the mouth of the Kanawha, and a hunting party 
sent out by them had been attacked by wandering Shawnees. 
As the spring wore on, these bold fellows at the Kanawha, 
animated by a desire for revenge, resolved on a sudden onset 
upon the Indian towns on the Scioto, in the disputed territory. 
They sought a famous frontiersman, Michael Cresap, and made 
him their leader. He had only recently moved to the upper 
Ohio from the frontier of Maryland. There was also in their 
niunber a young and daring spirit, George Rogers Clark, who 

Note. — The map on the opposite page, based on information afforded by General Richard But- 
ler, is taken from Crfevecceur's Leltres (Pun CuUivateur, vol. iii., Paris, 1783. 




/mcirti 



68 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR. 

had been brought thither to look after a grant which he had 
obtained at Fish Creek. This body of borderers, with its 
impromptu organization, was further recruited at the site of 
the modern Wheeling by additional hotheads, with whom it 
mattered little whether the stories of murders, which were in- 
creasing, were of whites by savages, or of the Indian by the 
frontiersman, — and there was no dearth of either kind of tale. 
Ebenezer Zane, the principal settler of this spot, had made 
here a tomahawk claim in 1769, whei'e he was joined the next 
year by his brothers, Jonathan and Silas. There was at this 
date (1774) a number of log houses clustering about those of 
the Zanes. 

The hotheads w^ere counseled to be prudent by the leader of 
this settlement, and CresaiJ seemed inclined to be cautious, but 
the trepidation was too Avidespread for perfect restraint. One 
observer tells us that in a single day a thousand bewildered 
settlers crossed over the Monongahela towards the east, and the 
whole country was finally stripped of inhabitants, except they 
were " forted." 

The war, if it came, was sure to have one advantage for the 
whites, and that was the single and unhampered purpose of 
Virginia to maintain her own, and this she w^as prepared to do 
without the aid of her neighbors. 

Sir William Johnson, in New York, was doing his best to 
hold back the Iroquois, but that part of these confederates 
which had advanced into the modern State of Ohio could not 
be restrained from making common cause with the Delawares 
and Shawnees. 

Logan was one of these migrated Iroquois, and it was his 
fate to become the pivot of events. He had been bred at 
Shamokin, and had long been known as a friend of the English. 
A small camp of his family and followers, on the north side 
of the Ohio, crossing the river to get rum, was set upon and 
killed by some lawless whites. Indian runners spread the news 
of the massacre, and Logan was soon, with such a band as he 
could gather, spreading devastation along the Monongahela 
and Holston, — and Dunmore's war was begun. 

The country north of the Ohio, where Dunmore expected to 
operate, was designated in the Parliamentary bill, now near Its 
passage, as " heretofore a part of the territory of Canada." 



THE FRENCH ON THE WABASH. 69 

This phrase struck sharply at the pride of Dunning and others, 
jealous of English honor, and Lord North at one time proposed 
to leave the words out. It was nrged by the opposition that 
nnder such an acknowledgment, if the time should ever come 
for France to regain Canada in a diplomatic balance, she could 
fairly contend for this conceded limit. While this apprehen- 
sion strengthened the opponents of the bill in England, the 
news of its progress through Parliament brought other fears to 
land speculators in Virginia. Some travelers and adventurers 
in the summer of 1773 had, nnder the lead of one William 
Murray, formed a company at Kaskaskia which became known 
as the Illinois Land Company, and with these the governor 
and various gentlemen of tide-water Virginia were associated. 
They had bargained with the Indians for large tracts of land, 
bounded by the Wabash, the Mississippi, and the Illinois, and 
the deed had been passed. Was their purchase now imperiled 
by this bill ? What was to be the effect of the measure upon 
the French traders and denizens of that country, and ujjon their 
relations to the Indians ? 

The French on the Wabash and beyond, occupying lands 
which the royal proclamation of 1763 had pledged to the 
Indians, had been for ten years a source of perplexity to the 
commanding general in New York. In September, 1771, Gage 
had reported that the tribes thereabouts were constantly im- 
periling the English traders, and " it is natural to suspect," he 
says, " that the French instigate the Indians against us to keep 
the trade to themselves." He then intimates that it may be- 
come necessary to dislodge the French at Vincennes. Early in 
ISIarch, Gage received royal orders to warn the French at that 
l)lace to remove immediately, and it is for us, he adds, " to let 
the neighboring Indians know that we shall have traders among 
them to take the place of the French." In April, 1772, Gage 
issued a proclamation of his intent to remove all settlers from, 
that country, English as well as French. They were given 
time to withdraw voluntarily. The warning was a cruel one 
to the French, who had enjoyed unquestioned homestead titles 
for seventy years. When their protests were sent to New 
York, Gage dallied in his decision. This gave time for the 
resignation of Hillsborough, forced by Franklin, to throw the 
control of the question into the tenderer hands of Lord Dart- 



70 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR. 

mouth, and the i^oor Freuch were respited. They went on, 
pursuing their avocations, hunting- and trading, and Patrick 
Kennedy, who was at this time exploring the Illinois, reports 
meeting them on its banks. It seems clear that the routes from 
Detroit, the home of the congeners of these Illinois French, 
were constantly traversed by these people, either by the Mau- 
mee or the Illinois River, — a journey in either case of near 
nine hundred miles to the MississipjDi, often the depot for their 
furs. Haldimand, in succeeding Gage, opened communica- 
tion with their western aliens. He had advised Gage that it 
would be difficult to controvert their land titles. Now under 
Dartmouth's orders he had cautioned the English commander 
at Fort Gage to be conciliatory towards them. A little later, 
Haldimand was endeavoring to get more direct information 
of their condition. He was instructing Lieutenant Hutchins 
to leave Pensacola and take the route north by the Mississippi, 
so as to bring him reports. Later still, he sent Lieutenant 
Hall to placate the Indians and prepare the French settlers 
for the stabler rule of the new bill. Gage, in London, was 
not less anxiously consulting with North and Dartmouth, and 
conferring with Carleton about its provisions. Haldimand 
was meanwhile constantly reporting new disorders on the Ohio, 
with a suspicion of French intrigue behind the savage irrup- 
tions, and there was need of haste in applying the assuaging 
effects of the bill. But its opponents were questioning the 
scheme because they thought it hopeless and unpatriotic to 
check an inevitable westward progress. Haldimand under- 
stood the real purpose of its promoters, when he said that the 
bill was aimed at preventing the Americans getting possession 
of the continent. Lord Lyttelton recognized the fact that to 
confine the Americans by such a barrier was to thwart their 
contest for empire. Wedderburn said distinctly that it was 
one object of the bill to prevent the English settling in that 
country, and that the new barrier would allow '' little tempta- 
tion " to send settlers north from the Vandalia grant. 

It was not only this territorial exj^ansion of Que])ec, but the 
concessions wliich the bill made to French Catholics, greater 
than any English Romanist could dare expect, and the grant of 
French law in British territory, which increased the steady 
aversion to it of English merchants, and which aroused the lord 



THE BILL PASSED. 71 

mayor and magistrates of London, because they supposed it 
imperiled British honor. For the seaboard colonists to enter 
that territory and find French law instead of English law, and 
to encounter an established Catholic religion, was not likely to 
strengthen the loyalty whose decadence the ministry was de- 
ploring- in the older colonies. " Does not your blood run cold," 
said Hamilton, " to think that an English Parliament could 
pass an act for the establishment of arbitrary power and popery 
in such an extensive country ? " However politic the modern 
historian may think this rehabilitating of French customs to 
have been for the vastly preponderating French element north 
of the St. Lawrence, to include the Ohio country in such provi- 
sions is not approved even by such defenders of the ministerial 
policy as Kingsford, the latest historian of Canada. There is 
indeed little to support the charges that the bill was but the 
first step in reducing " the ancient, free, Protestant colonies to 
the same state of slavery," by setting up " an example and fit 
instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these 
colonies." These were phrases used by Congress in an address 
to the people of Great Britain a few months later (October 21, 
1774), and still more solemnly in the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. They were simply loose sentences used for political ends. 
The Parliamentary opposition, which was dignified by the stip- 
port of Chatham and Burke, never ventured to think of any 
such effect on tlie Atlantic side of the Alleghanies from these 
untoward provisions, whatever the bravado utterances of Thur- 
low may have indicated. " I do not choose," said Burke at one 
time, " to break the American spirit, because it is the spirit 
that has made the country." 

The bill was inti'oduced on May 2, 1774, into the House of 
Lords, weary with the long sessions which the discussion of the 
Massachusetts coercive acts had caused. It went to the Com- 
mons, and passed that body on June 13, while Logan was ren- 
dering an Indian war in the designated region inevitable, 
and was sent back with amendments to the Lords. In this 
body, by a vote of fifty to twenty in a house that seated five 
hundred and fifty-eight members, and after the season was so 
far advanced that many peers had gone to their estates, it was 
passed on June 18, and four days later was approved by the 
king. In this way the government stultified itself. 



72 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR. 

Before the news could reach Virginia, bnt while the prospect 
seemed certain that such a bill would become law, Dunmore, 
OB July 12, instructed Andrew Lewis to descend the Kanawha 
with a force and cross the Ohio into the Shawnee country. 
Meanwhile, Major Angus McDonald passed the mountains with 
a body of militia, and, moving down the Ohio to the modern 
Wheeling, he found himself in command of about seven hun- 
dred sturdy fighters. Here, with the aid of the Zanes and 
following plans suggested by George Kogers Clark, he built 
Fort Fincastle, later known as Fort Plenry. Towards the end 
of July, he dropped down the river to Fish Creek, whence he 
made a dash upon the Shawnee villages on the Muskingum, — 
creating the first success of the war. 

Dunmore himself had left Williamsburg on July 10, and by 
the last of September he was at the head of about thirteen hun- 
dred men at Fort Fincastle. He kept out some experienced 
scouts, Clark, Cresap. Simon Kenton, and Simon Girty among 
the number. He sent Crawford forward to build Fort Gower 
at the mouth of the Hockhocking. 

The Indian agents, Johnson and his deputy, Croghan, — who 
was now living on the Alleghany just above the forks, — 
watched this war of Virginia and the Shawnees with solicitude. 
Sir William got his tidings of it through the Iroqiiois, and they 
associated all the barbarity of the whites with the name of 
Cresap. Logan certainly agreed, as his famovis speech shows. 
Rev. William Gordon had some time before transmitted to 
Dartmouth what purported to be a letter addressed by the 
French king to the Six Nations. In this they were told to 
keep up their courage, and they would, as they found oppor- 
tunity, enter Canada with eighty ships, while " an equal number 
entered the Mississippi to the aid of his southern children." 
The English were well aware of the uncertainties of a general 
savage uprising, with France on the watch. " There is too 
great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians," said 
Croghan, " and if the assembly gives in to that spirit, instead 
of securing the friendship of the Six Nations and' the Dela- 
wares by negotiation, no doubt they will soon have a general 
rupture." He adds that the Six Nations have tried to prevent 
the war with the Shawnees. With such an Iroquois as Logan 
aroused, there was little chance of peace. 



FIGHT AT POINT PLEASANT. 73 

The real stroke of the war came on the very site of the con- 
templated capital of Vandalia, in the angle formed by the jnnc- 
tion of the Kanawha with the Ohio, — Point Pleasant, as it 
was called. The conflict here was the most hotly contested 
fight which the Indians ever made against the English, and it is 
all the more remarkable as it was the first considerable battle 
which they had fought without the aid of the French. Lewis, 
on arriving at the spot, learned from Dunmore's messages, 
which the governor's scouts had hidden near by, that the gov- 
ernor with his forces would be on the Ohio at a point higher 
up, where Lewis was instructed to join him. The next day new 
orders came, by which it appeared that Dunmore intended to 
turn up tlie Hockhocking Kiver, and that Lewis was expected 
to cross the Ohio and join him in the Indian country. When 
Lewis was thus advised, his rear column had not come up, and 
his trains and cattle were still struggling in the wilderness. 
The force which he had with him at Point Pleasant was a 
motley one, but for forest service a notable body, and not a 
frontier settlement but had contributed to it. There were in 
it Shelby, Christian, Robertson, and Morgan, — heroic names 
in these western wilds. 

While Lewis was making ready to obey orders, a squad of 
men, out hunting, discovei-ed that a horde of Indians was upon 
them. Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief, had divined Dunmore's 
plan, and, with a strategic skill unusual with Indians, had 
crossed the Ohio for the purpose of beating his adversary in 
detail. The opposing armies were much alike in numbers, say 
eleven hundred each, — perhaps more, — and in forest wiles the 
difference was hardly greater. Cornstalk soon developed his 
l)lan of crowding the whites toward the point of the peninsula. 
Lewis pushed forward enough men to retard this onset, while 
he threw up a line of defense, behind which he could retire if 
necessary. He sent, by a concealed movement, another force 
along the banks of the Ohio, which gained the Indians' flank, 
and by an enfilading fire forced the savage line back. In the 
night, Cornstalk, thus worsted, recrossed the Ohio. 

Meanwhile, Dunmore, ascending the Hockhocking, marched 
towards the Scioto, making some ravages as he went. Corn- 
stalk, after his defeat, had hurriedly joined the tribes opposing 
Dunmore, but he found them so disheartened by his own dis- 



74 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUN MORE WAR. 

comfiture that he soon led a deputation to Dunmore's camp 
and proposed a peace. The governor, hearing- of Lewis's ajj- 
proach, and not feeling the need of his aid in the negotiations, 
and fearino- that the elation of the victorious borderers mi^ht 
disquiet the now complacent tribes, sent messages to Lewis 
that he should withdraw, which Lewis reluctantly did. A 
treaty followed. All prisoners were to be given up ; all stolen 
horses returned. No white man was to be molested on the 
Ohio, and no Indians were to pass to its southern bank. It 
was also agreed — in mockery, as the tribes must have felt — 
that no white man should cross to the north. Four chieftains 
were given to the whites as hostages. 

Logan kept aloof, and was sullen. He was a fighter and not 
a councilor, he said ; but he sent in the speech to which refer- 
ence has been made, an eloquent burst of proud disdain, if we 
can trust the report of it.. His string of scalps had satisfied his 
revenge. 

There were acts on Dunmore's part, such as his failure to 
succor Lewis, and his refusal to let him share in the treaty, 
which, when his conduct and that of his minion, Connolly, were 
later known in his eagerness to quell the patriotic uprising in 
tide-water Virginia, led many to suspect him of treachery in the 
negotiation with the Indians, and of a purpose to secure them 
to the royal side in the impending revolutionary struggle. 
There is no evidence that, at the time, this distrust prevailed. 
As late as March, 1775, the Virginia Assembly thanked him for 
his success. Yet it is true that he had, before he entered upon 
his campaign, dissolved the Virginia Assembly in May, 1774, 
in disapproval of their votes of sympathy for oppressed Boston. 

Dunmore had, indeed, obtained all he hoped for by bring- 
ing peace, in reestablishing a new hold for Virginia upon the 
territory, which, as he later learned, was on the first of the 
following May to pass, by action of Parliament, under a new 
jurisdiction. The grasp which Virginia had now taken had 
cost her X150,000, but it was to be of great importance in the 
coming struggle with the king, for she had administered a de- 
feat to the Indians, which was for some time to pai-alyze their 
power in that region. It was a grasp that Virginia was not to 
relax till she ceded her rights in this territory to the nascent 
union when the revolt of the colonies was ended, — a hold that 



THE COMMISSION TO CANADA. 75 

before long she was to strengthen through the wisdom and 
hardihood shown in her capture of Vincennes. 

Before the battle of Point Pleasant had decided the fate of 
the Indians, the passage of the bill, which in early summer had 
created so little attention in Parliament, was met in London by 
" a prodigious cry " in September, — a clamor that William 
Lee, then in England, did his best to increase by " keeping a 
continual fire in the papers." The bill was not to go into effect 
till the spring of 1775, and Carleton having returned to Canada, 
Dartmouth, in January, sent him instructions about putting it 
in force. The minister's letters must have crossed others from 
the governor, informing him of the opposition to the bill even 
among the French people of the province, and of the measures 
which the revolting colonies were taking to gain the Canadians 
to their cause. In Montreal the bust of the king had been 
defaced. 

Already in the previous September, Congress had reechoed 
the " prodigious cry " of London, and had declared the re- 
establishment of the Catholic religion in Quebec to be " danger- 
ous in an extreme degree ; " but this mistake in language was 
discovered, and John Dickinson drafted for that body a concil- 
iatory address to the Canadians, which, in March, 1775, Carle- 
ton informed Dartmouth the disaffected on the St. Lawrence 
were printing and distributing in a translation. Within a 
year the lesson of prudence had been forgotten, and singularly 
enough while Congress (February, 1776) was appointing a 
commission, with one Catholic member (Charles Carroll) and a 
Catholic attendant, to proceed to Montreal, the ardent Hugue- 
not blood of John Jay had colored an address of Congress to 
English sj^mpathizers by characterizing the Catholic faith " as 
a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets." It 
was only necessary for the loyal Canadians to translate and cir- 
culate Jay's imprudent rhetoric to make the efforts of tlie com- 
missioners futile. Congress again grew wiser when it framed 
tlie Declaration of Independence, and Dr. Shea has pointed out 
that the allusion to the Quebec Bill in that document is " so 
obscure that few now understand it, and on the point of religion 
it is silent." 

Congress thus failed to undo the Quebec Act by gaining the 



76 THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUN MORE WAR. 

jieople it was intended to shield ; and it was left for Virginia, 
under a pressure instigated by Maryland, to do what she could 
to make the territory, of which Parliament would have deprived 
her, the nucleus of a new empire beyond the mountains. 

England stubbornly adhered to her efforts to maintain the 
act north of the Ohio, as long as the war lasted. Before the 
actual outbreak, Franklin, in his informal negotiations in Lon- 
don, had told the ministry that there could be no relief from 
the dangers of " an arbitrary government on the back of the 
settlements " but in a repeal of the Quebec Act. He claimed 
it to be the right of the Americans to hold the lands which the 
colonists had acquired from the French, while at the same time 
it was their duty to defend them and set up new settlements 
upon them. Dunmore was naturally of another mind, and we 
know that after his treaty was made he schemed with the Dela- 
wares and the ministry to get a royal confirmation to that tribe 
of the country north of the Ohio and east of the Hockhocking, 
as a ready means to bar out the Virginians. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

1769-1776. 

Numerous rivulets, springing along the Blue Ridg-e in North 
Carolina, and broadening as they leap down the slopes, ulti- 
mately gather and flow towards the sea in two principal streams, 
— the Yadkin and the Catawba. There was a Scotch-Irish 
stock in this mountainous region, which was proving difficult 
for Governor Tryon, the royalist executive of that province, to 
manage. This recalcitrant spirit of indejiendence found an 
attractive seclusion in the free wilderness life which returned 
hunter and adventurer pictured beyond the mountains. One 
of these restless spirits dwelling- on the Yadkin has already 
been presented to us in Daniel Boone. 

In the valley interposing between the Blue Ridge and Iron 
Mountain, — the present western boundary of Noi*th Caro- 
lina, — a network of small streams unite and flow nortli to 
the Kanawha and Ohio. Other spraying threads of glistening 
life, drawing into a single channel, break through the Iron 
Mountain, when, increased by various tributaries, it becomes 
known as the Watauga, an affluent of the Holston, one of the 
chief branches of the Tennessee. To the valley of this stream, 
lying in what is now the northeast corner of the State of Ten- 
nessee, Daniel Boone had come, as we have seen, in 1769. 
There was soon after planted across the Indian war-path which 
this valley afforded — up and down which the northern and 
southern Indians had for years followed one another — the 
first permanent settlement beyond the mountains south of the 
Virginia grants. William Bean had built himself a cabin here, 
and his son was the first white child born in Tennessee. The 
communications of the region were easiest from Virginia and 
down the tributai^ies of the Kanawha. 

On October 18, 1770, a ti'eaty of Virginia with the Chero- 



78 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

kees, made at Loeliaber, in South Carolina, had extended the 
bounds of the OKI Dominion so far westerly as to correspond in 
the main with the present eastern line of Kentucky. Virginia 
thus secured from the Cherokees, in the very year in which 
their famous Sequoyah, the subsequent inventor of their alpha- 
bet, was born, their rights to much the same territory which 
had been ceded by the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix in 1768. If 
the southern bounds of Virginia (36° 31' north latitude) were 
where these Watauga people supposed, this Cherokee cession 
covered their valley, and they were under the protection of 
Virginia laws, so far as those ordinances coidd prevail in so 
distant a region. The new Lochaber line began at a point on 
the Holston — into which the Watauga flowed — and extended 
northward, and there was little knowledge of what it encoun- 
tered, till it struck the mouth of the Kanawha, whose springs 
were adjacent to those of the Watauga. The line really threw 
the upper parts of the valley of the Big Sandy River and the 
southwest angle of West Virginia ■ — excepting the extreme 
point of that angle — into the conceded territory. The main 
object of the treaty was to placate the Indians for the encroach- 
ments along the alluvial bottoms of the Kanawha, which the 
surveyors had been making in that region under the Fort 
Stanwix grant. That concession of the Iroquois had proved 
extremely irritating to the Cherokees, because it assumed to 
deal with their territory. 

Before the truth about the latitude of the Watauga settle- 
ment was known, there was a significant immigration thither, 
bringing upon the stage of western settlement some notable 
personages. In 1770, a supple and robust young man, whose 
blue eye had the alert habit of a hunter, and whose native air 
of command attracted notice wherever he went, and perhaps the 
weightiest man of all these trans- Alleghany pioneers, passed 
that way, bound on further explorations. In him, James Rob- 
ertson was first introduced to the little stockaded hamlet, where 
a few hardy adventurers were breasting the wilderness. The 
next year (1771) he came among them again, this time resolved 
to stay, for he had brought with him a train making sixteen 
families, whom he had induced to enter upon this new world. 
It was after the battle of the Alamance (May 16, 1771), where 
Tryon's force had dispersed the Regulators, — a body of asso- 



WATAUGA ASSOCIATION. 79 

ciates against horse thieves and tax-gatherers, — and some of 
that disaffected body, eager to find otiier conti'ol than a royal 
governor, were in this emigration. liobei'tson built himself a 
cabin on an island in the river, and events soon placed him in 
the forefront of a little colony, organized on manhood snft'rage 
and religious liberty. In it he acquired leadership, though he 
was more deficient in education than was usiial with pioneers, 
for he was only beginning to acquire the penman's art. 

In the same year (1771), Jacob Brown had formed a settle- 
ment on the Nollichucky, a branch of the Holstou next south 
of the Watauga, and it was he who, on the discovery being 
made, by the surveyors extending the southern line of Virginia, 
that both of these settlements were without the government 
of Virginia, entered into an agreement with the Cherokees, by 
which the joint communities, now numbering eighty souls, 
secured a lease of these valleys, in consideration of six thousand 
dollars' worth of goods, for a term of eight years. By this they 
avoided such an infringement as a purchase would be of the 
proclamation of 1763. 

These little communities, thus thrown out of the control of 
Virginia, and having no connection with North Carolina, though 
within her charter limits, were placed in much the same condi- 
tion in these western wilds that the Mayflower pilgrims were in 
a hundred and fifty years before, when, stranded beyond the 
patent of Virginia, they were forced into forming a compact of 
government. 

It was tlms, in the spring of 1772, that Robertson undertook 
a leading part in making what was called the Watauga Associa- 
tion. This was a combination of the people of the Watauga, 
Carter's, and the Xollichucky valleys, under written articles, for 
civil government and the protection of law. It was also a 
union, based on necessity and the Indian consent. With these 
environments they were ready to face the demand for their 
renioval made by Cameron, the British Indian agent, on the 
ground of their defying the royal proclamation. Tlie govern- 
ment, which the articles instituted, proved rugged enougli to 
survive all strains that were put iq>on it for six years. In 
Augiist, 1776, the association j^etitioned the North Carolina 
Assembly to be allowed to come under its protection. This 
paper is still existing in Sevier's handwriting. They professed 



80 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

a desire "to share in the glorious cause of liberty" with their 
brothers on the seaboard. In 1778, the region was organized 
as Washington County in North Carolina. This change brought 
but slight disturbance to the existing forms of government. . 

That this little republic of the wilderness lasted so success- 
fully was indeed owing to the character of the men who formed 
it. While in the throes of birth, the little community wel- 
comed to its shelter two other remarkable persons. Captain 
Evan Shelby was a frontier cattleman of no uncertain charac- 
ter, whose Welsh blood had been invigorated by his mountain 
career. John Sevier brought to the wilderness a handsome 
mien, which befitted his gentle Huguenot blood. His life as an 
Indian trader had given him an eager air, but a certain self- 
conscious dignity beamed from his blue eyes, and waves of 
brown hair haloed a well-poised head, carried erect, and show- 
ing a countenance lightened at times with gleams of merriment. 
He was now not more than six and twenty years old, with a life 
of striking incident and humane interests still before him. Pie 
was, says Phelan, the " most brilliant military and civil figure " 
in the history of Tennessee. In these three men, Robertson, 
Shelby, and Sevier, the Watauga settlement was fortunate in 
these formative days, for being without the pale of established 
civil control, the colony became easily the asylum of vagabonds 
and culprits escaping justice by flying over the mountains. 
With such intestine disturbances, and with the savages about 
them, the character of its chief rulers could be the only security 
which such an isolated community could possess. No copy of 
their self-imposed constitution of restraint has been preserved ; 
but we know enough of the workings of their simple govern- 
ment to see how the laws of Virginia, so far as applicable, with 
an executive committee to enforce them, and a sufficient method 
of record for lands, sufficed to answer all requirements. It was 
the earliest instance of a government of the people by the peo- 
ple, and under a written compact, beyond the mountains, and 
was established by men of American birth. 

In the year 1773, following this organization, Boone headed 
a party and started west. He had with him the first women 
and children who had passed the Cumberland Mountains. They 
passed beyond all civilization after they had tarried foi a brief 
interval amono^ a few families settled west of the Holsnn and 



I 



COLONEL HENDERSON. 81 

along the Clinch River, the other principal fork of the Ten- 
nessee. It was in September, 1773, when Boone and his 
adventurous families were joined by a band of hunters, and the 
company numbered eighty when a few weeks later ( October 10) 
they were attacked in Powell's valley by the Indians. In the 
fight they lost enough to discourage them, and so turned back 
to the settlements on the Clinch. It was now apparent that an 
Indian war was coming, and in the following S2:)ring (1774) the 
signs of it were everywhere, as has been depicted in the pre- 
ceding chapter. There were at the time various stray wanderers, 
hunters, and surveyors, pursuing devious ways, or squatted here 
and there throughout this remoter country. Now that Lewis, 
as we have seen, had been ordered with the Virginia forces 
down the Kanawha, and since the gage of war had been ac- 
cepted, Boone was sent to thrid this country and give warning. 
He and his companions found Harrod, McAfee, and their com- 
pany just beginning a settlement at the modern Harrodsburg. 
After Boone's caution, they abandoned their purpose. Other 
parties of whites, which they encountered, were informed of 
their danger. Boone's farthest point was the rapids of the 
Ohio. After an absence of sixty days and more, during which 
he had covered over eight hundred miles, he returned to his 
friends on the Clinch. 

Lewis's victory at Point Pleasant in October, 1774, rendered 
the navigation of the Ohio comj^aratively safe, and ojjcned the 
way for easy transportation to the regions of the lower Cum- 
berland and Tennessee. The blow which the savages had 
received proved enough to paralyze them for a while, and Ken- 
tucky, at this particular juncture, owed much to this resi)ite. 
The new opportunity encouraged a movement which for a time 
promised to regulate the western emigration on a more extended 
scale than had been before attempted. The reports which 
Boone had made of this western region had aroused many, 
among others Colonel Richard Henderson, a Virginian, now 
about forty years old. It was under his direction that a com- 
pany had been formed in North Carolina to buy land of the 
Indians and establish a colony beyond the mountains. In the 
early days of 1775, jNIartin, with a party of eighteen or twenty, 
had built some cabins and a stockade at what was later known 



82 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

as Martin's Station, about fifty miles beyond the Clinch River 
hamlet. The McAfees, about the same time, began a settle- 
ment on Salt River. Benjamin Logan had in another region 
begun a fort, to which the next year he brought his family. On 
Mai-ch 18, James Harrod and a party of fifty reoccupied the 
ground which he had abandoned on Boone's warning in 1774. 

This reoccupation of the region was in progress when Hen- 
derson and eight other North Carolinians, on March 17, 1775, 
at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, concluded a treaty with 
the Cherokees, by which they acquired the Indian title to about 
one half of the modern State of Kentucky and the adjacent 
part of Tennessee lying within the southerly bend of the 
Cumberland. The ceded territory was bounded by the Ken- 
tucky, Holston, Cumberland, and Ohio rivers, and received 
the name of Ti-ansylvania, — the particular grounds for bestow- 
ing which name, beyond its apparent meaning, are not known. 
The negotiation was not a sudden dash of business, for twelve 
hundred savages looked on and increased the usual Indian 
deliberation. They heard the speeches on both sides. One 
harangue, at least, from the Indians was a mournful protest 
against the white man's encroachments. The purchaser's blan- 
dishments at last prevailed, and for X10,000 worth of goods 
the instrument conveying not far from eighteen million acres 
of territory received the assent of Oconostota, an aged chief. 
The Raven and The Carpenter, other head men of the tribe, also 
joined in the conveyance. Two days later, the Watauga asso- 
ciates, with less regard for the royal pt-oclamation than before, 
by the payment of <£2,000 worth of merchandise, converted 
their existing lease into a purchase, and threw their interests 
into the general scheme. 

When a successful termination of the negotiation seemed 
certain, and a week before the deed was signed, Boone started 
under Henderson's direction to open a trail to the Kentucky, 
blazing and clearing a way which eventually was known as The 
Wilderness Road. It formed a connection between Cumber- 
land Gap and the remoter borders of the new colony. He was 
attacked on the way (March 25), losing some men, but push- 
ing on to a level bit of ground, with sulphur springs near by, 
he halted. Here, on April 18, he began a fort which took the 
name of Boonesborough. It served for the protection of the 



B ONE SB OR UGH. 



83 




score of companions which he had with him. Henderson later 
joined the little post, adding about thirty new men for the 
garrison, and, to give life to the movement, opened a land office. 
On May 23, there was a meeting of 
delegates in the fort. This assem- 
bly adopted some laws, including 
one for improving the breed of 
horses, and stands for the first legis- 
lative body which was ever held be- 
yond the mouijtains. Henderson, 
as the moving spirit in this action, 
was credited with having " epito- 
mized and simplified the laws of 
England." The popidation at that 
time throughout this district was 
variously estimated at from one 
hundred and fifty to three hundred, 
including land jobbers, squatters, 
and domiciled settlers, with as yet 
but few women among them. These 
scattered knots of people had such 
contact with the old plantations 
as could be made through the more 
eastei"ly hamlets on the Watauga, 
Nollichucky, and Clinch rivers. 
They formed a wedge of civiliza- 
tion, thrust between the Cherokees on the one hand and the 
Shawnees on the other. Adventurous spirits among them 
were pushing reconnoissances along many a tributary stream 
of the principal rivers. It seems pretty clear that if there 
was an excess of Scotch and Teutonic blood in this body of 
pioneers, there was a preponderating influence of English 
spirit. This dominant mood kept the varied racial impulses 
to a single purpose, and at a convention held at Pittsburg, 
jNlay 16, 1775, it gave an unmistakable support to the revolt 
which was now gaining head on the seaboard. Just before 
this, one Charles Smith found rebellious sentiments prevalent 
in this region, and advised Dartmouth that the coming of eight 
or ten thousand Irish in one year, "' uncultivated banditti," was 
in large part the source of such disloyalty. That English 



BOONESBOROUGH FORT. 

[From James Hall's Sketches of His- 
tory, Life, and Manners in the West, 
Pliiladelpliia, 1835. There were block- 
houses at the angles (1 is Colonel Hen- 
derson's, witli his kitchen at 3). At 
the corners and at the gates (9) were 
stockades (2 2, etc.). The intervals 
were filled with cabins, presenting 
blank walls to the enemy.] 



84 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

minister obtained much the same advice from the Bishop of 
Derry, who told him that nearly thirty-three thousand " fanati- 
cal and hungry republicans " had gone thither within a few 
years. The over-mountain country was doubtless attracting a 
fair share of this rampant overplus of Ireland. 

In the autumn of 1775, there were marks of a determinate 
fviture in this pioneer life. Boone, much to the colony's loss, 
had gone back to North Carolina during the summer, and now 
in September returned to his stockade with his wife and chil- 
dren. There were in his train the families of various others, 
who like himself were seeking new homes. The influence of 
all this was most fortunate. 

There was, meanwhile, a purpose in the older communities 
to hold the course of the Ohio against any force which the 
troublous times might array. In September, the Virginia 
militia had taken possession of Fort Pitt, and outposts were 
established at Fort Henry (Wheeling) and at Point Pleasant. 

Henderson's scheme, with its feudal tendencies, was proving 
inopportune. He was, as one observer said, " a man of vast 
and entei'prising genius," but an exacting domination made 
him enemies. Some who had been his adherents petitioned the 
Virginia Assembly to be relieved of the oath of fealty which 
he had exacted. The proprietors under his grant met in Sep- 
tember, 1775, and memorialized Congress for admission to the 
united colonies. They claimed a title to their lands acquired 
in open treaty " from immemorial possessors." They appealed 
for countenance to Jefferson and Patrick Henry, but got no 
encouragement. 

Dunmore, who had now become active on the royal side, was 
as impatient of Henderson's projects as the patriots were, and 
fulminated a proclamation against him for his contempt of the 
royal prohibitions, and for affording " an asyhnn for debtors 
and other persons of desperate circumstances." Governor 
Tryon, of North Carolina, who had himself been ambitious of 
territorial dignities and a baronetcy, was as prompt as Dunmore 
in launching his disapprobation. The obstacles on all sides 
were more than Henderson could overcome, and his project was 
abandoned, though there was later, as we shall see, an effort 
made in Congress to effect some equitable provision for his out- 



INDIAN DEPARTMENTS. 85 

lay. " His scheme," says John Mason Brown, " was the hist 
appearance on American soil of the old idea of government by 
lords proprietor. It was too late for success." 

In April, 1775, Dunmore had threatened to incite a servile 
insurrection in the east ; and in May he informed the home gov- 
ernment that he was planning to arouse the western Indians. 

Dr. Connolly, then at Pittsburg, had already been instructed 
by Dunmore " to endeavor to incline the Indians to the royal 
cause," and Connolly succeeded so far as to induce the tribes 
to transmit a large belt to the governor. While Comiolly 
was doing this he was in correspondence with Washington, and 
learned from him ^ that matters " on the seaboard " were draw- 
ing to a point." As the summer wore on, Connolly found that 
the same sort of danger as on the coast — which in June had 
driven Dunmore on board a British frigate at York — grew 
ai)ace along the frontiers. 

On June 30, the Continental Congress had set up three In- 
dian departments : the northeru, including the Six Nations and 
tribes at the north : the southern, embi'aeing the Cherokees 
and other tribes farther towards the Gulf ; while the middle 
department had its central point at Pittsburg. Here three 
commissioners, later appointed, were expected to deal with the 
tribes and counteract the sinister efforts of the royalists. Dun- 
more, who had expected at this time to meet Indian delegates 
at Fort Pitt, so as to ratify the treaty which he had made in 
1774 at Camp Charlotte, found it prudent not to trust himself 
on such a mission. The Virginia Assembly sent instead James 
Wood, with Simon Girty as guide, to seek the Indians and keep 
them quiet. Tlieir efforts were effective enough to induce tlie 
tribes (October) to decide for neutrality. 

The outbreak near Boston in April had precipitated the inev- 
itable. A band of hunters, encam})ing on a branch of the Elk- 
horn in the Kentucky wilds, hearing of the act of war on Lexing- 
ton green, gave that name to the spot on which they w^ere, and 
the name survives in Kentucky, as in jVlassaehusetts, to attest 
the brotherhood of tlie hour. It was another manifestation of 
this fraternal sympathy which made Franklin bring forward his 
plan of confederation. The same sj-mpathy prompted Thomas 
Paine to say that " nothing but a Continental form of gov- 



86 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

ernment can keep the peace of the Continent." It gave the 
Tories of the frontiers occasion to feel the coercive power of the 
men who were shaping the political views of the West in a con- 
vention at Pittsburg. It made Michael Cresap enlist his old 
companions of the fi-ontiers, and march them to Boston. 

A narrative of Connolly has been preserved, which shows his 
movements during the summer and autumn. He had been in 
Boston, and had there planned with General Gage — who had ar- 
rived in that town in May, 1774 — a movement which Dunmore 
had hoped to assist in carrying out. In November, he was in 
Williamsburg in conference with Dunmore, now sheltered on his 
man-of-war. It was then arranged that Connolly, accompanied 
by Cameron and Smyth, — who has left an account in his Trav- 
els., — should make a " secret expedition to the back country," 
going in a flatboat up the Potomac, and thence passing by the 
Ohio, Scioto, and Sandusky to Detroit. They started on No- 
vember 13. It was expected that a considerable force would 
gather at Detroit, some coming from the Illinois. In the spring 
this little army was to advance by PresquTsle to Pittsburg 
and crush the rebellion thereabouts. Leaving a garrison here, 
it was intended to take and fortify Port Cumberland and seize 
Alexandria, to which point Dunmore was to come with a fleet. 
A successful result would have cut off the southern colonies 
from the northern. They had provided that if Pittsburg suc- 
ceeded in resisting, the force should fall down the Mississippi, 
collect the garrison at Port Gage (Illinois), and on reaching 
New Orleans take transports to Norfolk, where Dunmore w^ould 
await them. 

The plan soon miscarried through Connolly's sending a letter 
of effusive Toryism to Pittsburg, and the later recognition of 
him at Hagerstown on November 19, 1775, by an officer just 
from the American camp before Boston, who had seen him on 
his recent visit to that vicinity. While being conducted east, 
he managed at Fredericktown, in Maryland, to write to McRae, 
who was in Pittsburg, telling him of his capture, and that 
their " scheme " must fail, and directing McRae to go down the 
river, warning by messenger the commander at Detroit and in 
the Illinois, and then to descend the Mississippi and return by 
water to Viririnia. 



INDIANS IN WAR. 87 

Connolly's companion, Smyth, managed to escape, but was 
recaptured, and found to be bearing other letters from Con- 
nolly, further attesting his intrigues. 

The arrest of Connolly probably deferred for two years the 
active participancy of the Kentucky settlers in the war on the 
western borders. There were lying along the western frontiers 
from New York to the Mississippi, at this time, a body of Indians 
that might perhaps have furnished ten thousand braves to 
any hostile movement which enlisted their sympathies. As it 
turned out, there was little Tory influence for these two years 
brought to bear upon them, and Zeisberger and Kirkland, by 
their missionary efforts, held in restraint at least the western 
Iroquois and the Delawares. 

While Connolly was arranging in Virginia for this north- 
western movement. Colonel Henry Hamilton, formerly a cap- 
tain in the fourteenth regiment, had been put by Carleton in 
command of Detroit. This town and its dependencies stretched 
up and down the river, with a population mainly Fi-ench and 
perhaps two thousand in numbers. Only four days before Con- 
nolly left Williamsburg, Hamilton had i-eached (November 9, 
1775) his post. He soon made up his mind that it was simply 
a question whether he or the Virginians should first secure 
the alliance of the savages. There is little doubt that either 
side, British or Americans, stood ready to enlist the Indians. 
Already before Boston the Americans had had the help of the 
Stockbridge tribe. Washington found the service committed 
to the practice when he arrived at Cambridge early in July. 
Dunmore had taken the initiative in securing such allies, at 
least in purpose, but the insurgent Virginians had had of late 
more direct contact with the tribes, and were now striving to 
secure them, but with little success. It was evident, with Ham- 
ilton in command at Detroit, and with the lurking enmity sub- 
sisting between the savages and the frontier pioneers, that in the 
end a conflict must come. 

Had Dunmore's plan been successful at the north, a counter 
plan, which we shall see was developed later, might earlier 
have found a body of British troops with Indian allies march- 
ing from the Gulf, up through the country of the Creeks and 



88 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

Chickasaws, and gaining theii" assistance in an attack upon the 
back country of Virginia and Carolina. 

To make any such project effective, it was necessary for the 
English agents among the Indians to accustom the tribes to a 
policy quite different from that which had fostered dissensions 
among them, in order to turn their savage wrath from the 
colonial borders. The political revulsions on the seaboard had 
convinced the British conmianders in America that instead of 
repelling the Indians from the Appalachian border, as of old, 
it was become politic to mass them and hurl them against it. 
This change of front in the Indian agents created some suspi- 
cion in the savage breast. The Creeks particularly were wary, 
and some of them had already lent assistance to the rebellious 
colonists. 

Of the thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand warriors which 
it is estimated there were at this time living east of the Mis- 
sissippi, there were nearly ten thousand among the southern 
tribes which Stuart was intricuinor to combine. Among them 
the Cherokees, a mountain folk, had lost something of their old 
prominence through their long wars. They had been forced by 
the Creeks to make common cause with them in land treaties 
with the English, having in this way joined them in June, 1773, 
at Augusta (Georgia) in ceding something like two million 
acres on the Savannah, stretching towards the Oconee. In this 
way the two tribes had striven to liquidate, by what they re- 
ceived for the lands, the claims against them of the English 
traders. 

The Chickasaws were less numerous, but they maintained 
their old reputation as hard fighters. The Catawbas, who in 
times past had so defiantly stood their ground against the Iro- 
quois, were now reduced so much as to be of little moment in 
any enumeration. The Choctaws were nearest the Spaniards, 
and a ruder people than the other tribes ; but the Creeks were 
certainly the most powerful of all. Early in 1772, they had 
resisted all importunities of the northern tribes to make com- 
mon cause with them ; yet for some years they had given the 
borderers of Georgia and Carolina much ground to dread their 
treacherous savagery. They had, however, been quiet since 
October, 1774, when they had been forced to a peace. Under 
Stuart's instructions, the jjersonal assiduity of his lieutenant 



HOSTILE CHEROKEES. 89 

Cameron was doing much to band all these southern tribes in 
the British interest, though Cameron himself felt some com- 
punctions in urging them to actual conflict. The Americans, 
l)y an intercepted letter, learned that the British agents had 
been instructed to maintain " an immediate connnunication with 
our red brothers," through Florida. 

The British ministry had planned an attack on Charleston 
(S. C.) for the early summer of 1776, and Germain had di- 
rected Stuart, in conjunction with the loyal borderers of Caro- 
lina, to time an Indian rising so as to produce a distraction 
amono; the rebellious Carolinians at the same time. Stuart 
formed, as the ministry intended, a double base at Mobile and 
Pensacola ; he carried thither a supply of ammunition, to be 
conveyed thence into the Indian country, and so make up to the 
tribes the resources from which they had been cut off by the 
attitude of the revolting Georgians and Carolinians. It was a 
game at which both sides could play, and Wilkinson, the Ameri- 
can commissary, was doing what he could to secure the neu- 
trality, if not the active aid of the savages, by a rival distribu- 
tion of rum and trinkets, — a measure that before long Germain 
was asking Stuart to copy. That agent, coursing through the 
up-country, says that he encountered on the Tennessee River 
several boats, conveying settlers from the Holston to riv^er sites 
as far down the Mississippi as Natchez, whither, it was no un- 
usual complaint at this time, persons flying from justice be- 
took themselves, mingled with others who fled from the turmoil 
which the war was creating on the seaboard. Stuart thought 
that the present exodus was helped by the promised neutrality 
of the Creeks and Cherokees. 

Stuart wrote to the colonial secretary that this apathy of 
these tribes did not disturb him, for he had no doubt that, when 
the pinch came, the savages could be induced to aid the British. 

Early in 1776, Stuart had confidently reported that every- 
where the Cherokees were painted black and rod for war, and 
that the rebels had succeeded in enticing oidy a few of their 
head men to meet commissioners at Fort Charlotte. 

Nothing was stirring the southern tribes so effectually as 
northern emissaries, who brought tidings of a wides])read pur- 
pose among the Indians beyond the Ohio to make common 
cause with the British aoainst the colonial rebels. These mes- 



90 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

sengers also alleged that the French in Canada, appeased by 
the Quebec Bill, were assisting them. These northern dele- 
gates, particularly the Delawares, assured their southern kins- 
folk that their fathers, the French, who had been long dead, 
were alive again, and were quite a match for the four or five 
thousand armed provincials which they had seen or heard of at 
Pittsburg and in other posts on the way. 

There was indeed a long-cherished purpose, on the part both 
of the home government and of Carleton at Quebec, that the 
movement ujion the southern frontiei-s should be supported by 
an equally hostile demonstration along the borders of Penn- 
sylvania and Virginia. The task of arousing these northern 
tribes, as it happened, was not so easy as to fire the southern 
Indians, for the lesson which Lewis had given them at Point 
Pleasant was not forgotten. 

Hamilton, the new commander at Detroit, possessed of verbal 
instructions from Carleton, had reached that post in November, 
1775, and it was soon a struggle between him, instructed to 
mass the Indians for a raid of the borders, and Morgan, the 
American agent for the Indians, whose task was to detach the 
Indians from the British interests. Morgan had succeeded 
Richard Butler in charge of the Indians of the middle depart- 
ment in the previous April, and found for his support at Pitts- 
burg a Virginia company under Captain John Neville. In 
June, he had sent messengers to the Shawnees and Wyandots 
to meet him in council, and in October, he got together some 
six or seven hundred Mingoes, Shawnees, and Delawares, and 
exacted from them a promise of neutrality. Hamilton's influ- 
ence was too great with the Ottawas, Wyandots, Pottawatta- 
mies, and Chippewas for Morgan to prevail ui^on them to join 
in the pact. 

The retreat of the Americans from Canada had made it pos- 
sible for Carleton in June to send word to the western stations 
that he no longer needed their help. This gave Hamilton the 
freedom he desired, and he notified Dartmouth that he and his 
Indians were ready for the contest. He says that an embassy 
from the eastern tribes to the great western confederacy had 
just been at Detroit with a belt, and that he had torn it before 
their faces. These messengers were an Englishman, a Delaware 



WATAUGA ATTACKED. 91 

chief, and Montour, the half-breed. They had brought a copy 
of the Pennsylvania Gazette, and from this Hamilton had 
learned of the action of Congress on July 4, and how the 
Declaration of Indej)endence had declared his dependent braves 
" merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an 
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions," 
— a description which he knew how to reveal to his Indian allies. 

Meanwhile, the savage conflict had been precipitated at the 
south. The Cherokees had decided upon war, and they had 
reason to count upon aid from the very tribes which Morgan 
was sti'iving to coerce. As early as May, 1776, Stuart had sent 
warning messages to the Watauga settlements, declaring what 
they might expect if they encouraged rebellion. These colonists 
at once drew in their outposts, and sent to Virginia for rein- 
forcements. In June, the blow fell. The Powell valley com- 
munity was raided and broken up, and there was alarm through- 
out the various Tennessee settlements, now numbering perhaps 
six hundred souls. The main assaults were from two bands 
moving at the same moment, and counting, perhaps, three or 
four hundred each. The borderers fortunately had received 
warning of the point of attack from a friendly half-breed 
woman. The threatened neighborhoods had therefore ample 
time to draw their dependents witliin their stockades. Such 
a force, " forted " at Eaton's Station, aroused by the devasta- 
tions of an approaching band, sallied on July 20, one hundred 
and seventy in number, and mai-ched to confront it. The 
whites had encountered only a small party of savages, and, 
while returning, were near the Long Island Flats of the Ilolston, 
when the Indians, supposing them on the retreat, fell impetu- 
ously on their rear, but not before the borderers had time to 
deploy. A sharp contest followed and the enemy fled, only 
four of the whites being hurt. 

The same day, another body of savages attacked the stockade 
at Watauga, where James Robertson commanded and Sevier 
was second. The fort held one hundred and forty souls, of 
whom forty were fit to fight. The enemy hung about the spot 
for three weeks, and then retreated, just as there appeared a 
force of three hundred men to succor the besieged. These two 
movements were the princijial ones, intended as a diversion to 



92 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

assist the British attack on Charleston, but they were ill-timed. 
Parker, the English admiral, had been repulsed at Fort Moul- 
trie nearly a month earlier, so these savage demonstrations 
failed in every way to advance the British plans, and in the end 
left the southern colonies free to retaliate upon the Cherokees, 
the head and front of the harrowing work along the borders. 

The united tribes of this nation, so long the allies of the Eng- 
lish against the French, had been stirred by Stuart and Hamil- 
ton's friends among the Ohio Indians to these acts of hostility, 
and were destined to have their power completely broken. The 
Cherokee people were grouped in three settlements. Their 
lower towns lay against the South Carolina frontiers, and could 
send between three and four hundred men upon the warpath. 
The middle towns farther north, joined with their villages in 
the mountain valleys, were more than twice as powerful ; while 
the over-hill settlements, the most northern of their positions, 
were nearly as strong for defense as the middle towns. Accord- 
ingly, the several sections could furnish, perhaps, two thousand 
braves for a campaign, and the more remote districts of the 
same stock might add enough to make their available fighting 
force not far from two thousand five hundred. 

Respecting the retaliatory campaign of the whites which we 
are now to touch upon, there is much confusion of statement 
among those who have in large part told the story from hear- 
say, and there are few contemporary records to help us to a 
certainty as to dates, movements, and numbers. In the lead- 
ing features of the campaign, however, there is little obscurity. 
The patriots in Georgia appear to have been the earliest to 
move. In March (1776), Colonel Bull, with a force of militia, 
had marched toward Savannah to overawe the Tories, and he 
is said to have had some Creeks in his ranks, for that tribe 
had of late been propitiated by a show of justice on the part 
of the Georgia authorities in the piuiishment of offenses com- 
mitted against members of their body. In July, Governor 
Bullock was preparing a force to invade the lower Cherokee 
lands, and under Colonel Jack aboiit two hundred savages 
devastated some of their hamlets on the Tugaloo River. 

While this was going on. General Charles Lee, now in com- 
mand at Charleston, begged (July 7) the Virginia authorities to 
league the southern colonies in a joint expedition, and on the 



THE CHEROKEES ATTACKED. 93 

30th, Congress recommended sucli a project to Virginia, the 
Carolinas, and Georgia. The Virginians were quite ready for 
their task. Jefferson, in August, was urging a foray into the 
heart of the Indians' country, with a determination to drive 
them beyond the Mississippi. President Page began prepara- 
tions, and notified the govei'nors of the Carolinas that he was 
going to send a force against the upper towns of the Cherokees, 
and pressed them to attack the middle and lower towns. Colonel 
William Christian was selected for the command of the Vir- 
ginia forces. He was joined, as he went on, by a company from 
Pennsylvania under Martin, and by some recruits from the 
parts of North Carolina contiguous to the Virginia bounds. 
His force grew to be some two thousand strong. A trader, 
Isaac Thomas, served him as guide. His plan was to rendez- 
vous on the Holston, and on October 1, he started with such 
other contingents from Watauga and the Tennessee settlements 
as could be recruited. His expectation was to reach Broad 
River on October 15, where he looked for resistance. His 
orders were to make a junction with General Rutherford, who 
commanded a North Carolina force, moving at the same time ; 
but his communication with him failed, and on October 6, he 
wrote to Governor Henry that Rutherford might possibly be 
fortunate enough to reach the over-hill towns before him, and 
begin the work of devastation. Christian reached the Broad 
River a little aliead of his expectations, and crossed it by an 
unfamiliar ford in the night. He now found that the Indians 
had fled and lay in force before their towns, at a distance of 
four or five days' march. Early in November, he reached the 
towns, without a battle, and began destroying cabin and cro])s. 
For two weeks he was thus employed, and then, forcing the 
Indians to a truce and exacting an agreement from them to 
meet commissioners and arrange for a permanent peace in the 
spring, he began his return march. He had not lost a man. 
His force was generally impressed with the attractions of tliis 
over-hill country. 

During this march he had not seen or heard of Rutherford, 
who, with an army of two thousand men and a train of supplies, 
had started from the head-streams of the Catawba on Sep- 
tember 1. He is thought to have had with him a small body 
of the vanishing Catawbas. He kei)t about a thousand of his 



94 



SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 



../^sj/^V^ 




-^**^Sftfc^^^j T 




most effective troops and a small body of 
liorse well ahead, and making a forced march, 
he found the Cherokee towns abandoned. 
He had expected to meet here Colonel An- 
drew Williamson with a force from South 
Carolina, but that failing, he ravaged the 
valley towns alone, and then pushed over 
the mountains and made havoc among the 
middle towns. He escaped on the way an 
ambush which had been prepared for him, 
by reason of taking an unaccustomed path. 
Returning on September 18 to the middle 
towns, he met the South Carolinians there. 
Williamson had, since the early days of Au- 
gust, been leading a force of some eleven or 
twelve hundred rangers among the lower 
towns, burning and destroying all he could. 
He now pushed ahead by the route which 
Rutherford had avoided and fell into the 
ambush. He was staggered for a while, but 
rallying his men, he drove the savages back 
and crossed the mountains successfully. 
Rutherford coming on, the two devastated 
the settlements, and late in September turned 
back. Here, again, a fearful penalty had 
been imposed upon the enemy, and the lar- 
gest force of all the Cherokee bands had 
been brought to obedience, though they had 
inflicted more loss upon Williamson than any other contingent 
had suffered. His casualties counted up on October 7, when he 
reached Fort Rutledge on his return, ninety-four in killed and 
wounded. 

The whites cov\ld reckon as the outcome of the campaign the 
almost complete prostration of the Cherokee nation. It proved 
an effectual warning to the neighboring tribes, and a respite for 
the frontiers. The government at Philadelphia were as much 
relieved as the frontiers, and the Committee of Secret Corre- 
spondence wrote to their agents in Europe that " they had now 
little to apprehend on account of the Indians." The whites 
had established new and enlarged bounds to the territory open 



cQ 






/■/ri- 



i?i /'/~/f ^/-/a^??. 



WILLI A MSON'S CAMP A IGN. 



95 




for tlieir occupancy. Tliey had brought the Tennessee settle- 
ments well within the jurisdiction of the older governments, 
and Watauga, as we have seen, was now ready to be annexed 
to North Carolina. During- the next year (May 20 and July 
20, 1777) definitive treaties were made by which lands on the 
Savannah were ceded to Georgia and South Carolina, and on 
the Holston to North Carolina and Virginia. The Chicka- 
mauga tribe of the Cherokees refused to join in the cessions, 
and moving- down the Tennessee, a hundred miles below the 
mouth of the Holston, they settled on what is known as the 
Chickamauga Creek. Other sections of the nation withdrew 
from immediate contact with the English. Thouoh humbled 



96 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

tliey were not quelled, and the intermittent outrages which 
were reported in the settlements told how revenge still swayed 
them. Sevier and his rangers had enough to do in hovering 
about them to repress their audacity. 

Of the two movements in the regions beyond the mountains 
likely to bring the claims of Virginia for a western extension 
to a sharp issue, — of which beginnings have been already 
sketched, — one was the resurrection of what was known as the 
Indiana grant. This had been made at the time of the Fort 
Stanwix treaty to an association of traders, seeking in this way 
to recoup themselves for losses incurred in the Pontiac war. 
Nothing had happened to make the grant of use, from the time 
it was secured, in 1768 till the proprietors held a meeting in 
September, 1775. Four months later (January 19, 1776) they 
transferred their interests under this Indian title to three Phila- 
delphia merchants, who not long after (March, 1776) deter- 
mined to open a land office for the sale of the lands. With the 
unsettled quarrel which then existed between Pennsylvania 
and Virginia about their bounds, it was far from propitious for 
these merchants that their project must encounter the landed, 
interests of a rival province. The new grantees were quite 
willing to make allowances to such settlers as were already in 
possession, but with the pretensions of Virginia to back them, 
these squatters did not pi'opose to be mulcted at all. 

Meanwhile, the people of the upper Ohio regions determined 
to bring an end, if possible, to the harassing complications im- 
posed iqjon them by the rival States and asi)iring companies. 
They sought (August, 1776) an autonomy of their own, by 
asking Congress to set them up as the State of West Sylvania. 
They claimed, rather extravagantly, that there were twenty-five 
thousand families between the mountains and the Scioto, and. 
they would include them in a territory to be carved from Vir- 
ginia and Pennsylvania beyond the mountains, and to extend 
well into Kentucky. The project failed, and three years later 
(1779) Virginia forced an issue by declaring the native title 
of the Indiana grant invalid. The Vandalia and Indiana com- 
panies memorialized Congress (September 14, 1779) against 
the Virginia pretensions. In the end Congress (1782) sus- 
tained the grant, and a new company took the question (1792) 



TEA NS YL VA NIA . 97 

to the Supreme Court of the United States. Here the cause 
lingered till Virginia secured a change in the Constitution. 
This, the eleventh amendment (1794), prohibited individuals 
of one State bringing- suit against another, and the question 
dropped. 

The other movement to effect Virginia's western claims was 
more rapidly closed, notwithstanding- an attempt to bring- it 
before Congress. This was the Transylvania project already 
traced in its initial stages. By the close of 1775, Henderson 
had established an agent at Philadelphia. In December, this 
])erson was reporting to his principal that John and Samuel 
Adams were agreed to induce Congress to give countenance to 
the new colony. Even Jefferson was quite willing to forget the 
charter limits of Virginia, if a firm government could be estab- 
lished at the back of that province, and its jurisdiction main- 
tained as far as the Mississippi, in opposition to the provisions 
of the recent Quebec Bill. In such views he had a natural 
abettor in John .Vdams, who was anxious lest the British, reach- 
ing- this western country by the St, Lawrence, should stir the 
tribes to embrace Dunmore's plan of harrying- the country be- 
yond the Alleghanies. It was in part this fear that had induced 
Congress, in March (1776), to send a commission to Canada, 
whose work, as we have seen, was so hampered by Jay's out- 
spoken denunciation of the Catholic Church. 

Jefferson, notwithstanding his sympathy with Henderson's 
movement, was not quite i)repared to favor congressional recog- 
nition of the new colony until Virginia had first agreed to it. 
I)ut he reckoned too surely upon Virginia recognizing that the 
borders needed any such sacrifice on her part. 

The war with the mother country had gone too far to be 
controlled by any moderate faction. France had already made 
ready to afford the revolting- colonies the pecuniary assistance 
which they needed. Events were fast drifting to the verge of 
independence, and there were warnings of it everywhere. A 
Scotch-Irish settlement at Hanna's Town in western Penns}^- 
vania had but just (May, 1776) given encouragement to such 
a movement, and not far from the same time the loyalists of 
the Watauga settlement had been drummed out of the valley. 

With the inevitable in view, Congress in May, 1776, had 



98 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

called upon each State to set up a form of government suffi- 
cient for the crisis. In June, Fort Moultrie had been attacked, 
while Stuart sought, as we have seen, by an Indian uj)rising 
in the South, to make a diversion to assist the attack. Three 
days later, resolutions of independence were laid before Con- 
gress (June 7), and the die was cast. Within a week Virginia 
passed her declaration of rights, and two weeks and a half 
later (June 29) she adopted her constitution. This last docu- 
ment gave her the opportunity to make a solemn declaration 
of her territorial rights. It was the beginning of a long con- 
troversy, which settled the destiny of the American West. She 
I'ecognized the diminution of her charter limits of 1609, so far 
as the subsequent grants to Maryland and Pennsylvania im- 
paired them, but she insisted on her own definitions of those 
grants, and abated otherwise nothing of her trans-Alleghany 
claims. Jefferson shortly after tried to improvise a temporary 
line to divide the region on which Virginia disputed with Penn- 
sylvania, but no line could prevent existing settlers of one 
province becoming occupants of the other. Maryland, mean- 
while, had raised a question which was far-reaching. Congress 
on September 16, 1776, in decreeing grants of land for services 
in the army, put Maryland (being a province of definite west- 
ern bounds) to a disadvantage as compai'ed with Virginia as 
well as with other States, whose original charters gave them a 
western extension. So Maryland began that movement, in 
which in the sequel her persistency acquired that trans-Alle- 
ghany domain jointly for all the States. 

Virginia herself removed all complications that the existence 
of such an independent government as Transylvania could in- 
terpose by declaring private purchase from the Indians without 
validity, and by promptly throwing the protection of her laws 
over the whole region. So Transylvania vanished, when all 
Kentucky was set up, December 7, 1776, as a county of the 
Old Dominion. 

Two years later, in accordance with the recommendations of 
a committee headed by George Mason, Virginia made the Tran- 
sylvania proprietors some recompense for legislating them out of 
existence, by making to them a grant of two hundred thousand 
acres, between the Ohio and the Greenbrier River. In accej^t- 
ing this the proprietors disavowed their Cherokee title. This 



KENTUCKY. 99 

denial of autonomy to Transylvania was the beginning of a new 
life in the great forest-shaded country of Kentucky, where the 
limestone lay bedded below and the blue grass flourished above. 
Jefferson said that nothing could stay the tide of emigration. 
It was indeed not a little swelled by the timid and half-hearted 
in the patriot cause whom the war was turning away from old 
associations. Some northern Indians passing athwart the west- 
ward paths of these wayfarers were struck with the multitude 
of fresh tracks of man and beast. This emigrant inarch fol- 
lowed what was known as the Wilderness Road, — already re- 
ferred to, — which, passing Cumberland Gap, proceeded, by the 
route which Boone had marked out, in a northwesterly direction 
to the great gateway of the enticing level lands of Kentucky. 
These began in the neighborhood of Crab Orchard, ji;st short by 
a score of miles of the site of Danville, first laid out in 1784. 
Its course is at present intertwined with the modern railway. 
Not far away was Crow's Station, just coming into prominence 
as a sort of political centre of these distant communities. This 
vicinity was in the southeastern angle of a tract of country, 
roughly square, of about a hundred miles on each side, of which 
the three remaining angles were at the falls of the Ohio (Louis- 
ville), at the most northern turn v/hich that river makes some 
twenty miles below Cincinnati, and at Limestone, the present 
Maysville, three hundred miles below Pittsburg and one hundred 
from Wheeling. So this fertile tract, with three of its angles 
touching the encircling Ohio, and a fourth at its mountain-gate, 
included the territory watered by the Licking and Kentucky 
rivers in their more level courses. These streams thridded a 
vast forest of broad-leaved trees, whose lofty triinks, unembar- 
rassed by undergrowth, supported a canoj^y of verdure beneath 
which the country was easily traversed. The entrance for the 
overland pioneers near Crab Orchard was also the exit for 
nearly all who were returning to the Virginia settlements. In 
this way the traveler avoided the laborious pull against the cur- 
rent of the Ohio, whether bound for Pittsburg, or taking the 
alternative route up the Kanawha and Greenbrier. Fi-om near 
Crab Orchard, the pioneers seeking settlement turned much 
in the same direction in which the railways cross the country 
to-day. The borderer descending by the Ohio, and landing at 
Limestone, followed along the outline of this squarish tract to 



100 SOUTH OF THE OHIO. 

Crab Orchard, and so could pass south to the Tennessee coim- 
try, by what Evans and Gibson's maj) marked as " the only 
way passable with horses from the Ohio three or four hundred 
miles southward." The overland wanderer less often took this 
same route in reverse. Commonly he passed by another trail 
through Harrodsburg, and so crossed the Kentucky near Frank- 
fort, and went on to the mouth of the Licking, opposite the 
later Cincinnati. A lesser number, probably, passed by a south- 
westerly curve, within sight of the mountainous barrier in that 
direction, and came upon the Ohio at the site of the modern 
Louisville. It was complained, as respects this latter spot, that 
a few gentlemen " had engrossed all the lands at and near the 
falls of the Ohio,'' which with the sanguine was likely to be 
" the most considerable mart in this part of the world." 



( 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

1766-1777. 

The war, which in the end had wrested the valley of the St. 
Lawrence from the French, and, as it turned out, had made the 
English share the valley of the Mississippi with the Spaniards, 
had in its beginning put an end to all schemes for penetrating 
the country lying west of the Mississippi and beyond the sources 
of the St. Lawrence. There was still the same uncertainty 
that there had always been regarding the sources of both these 
great rivers. It had been a question, even, if they did not 
unite somewhere, just as the waters of Lake Michigan and 
the Illinois commingled in the spring freshets. At all events, 
their sources might not be far apart. Wynne, in his General 
Jlistort/ of the Brithh Empire in Amerieu (1770), rather slur- 
ringly mentions a pretense that the St. Lawrence " was derived 
from remote northwestern lakes, as yet unknown to Europeans." 

To solve this question and the other antiquated notion that 
there was, not far from these neighboring springs, yet another 
fountain, whose waters flowed to the Pacific, was a dream that 
had puzzled a Connecticut Yankee who had been brooding- 
over the speculations of Hennepin, La Hontan, and Charlevoix. 
This man, Jonathan Carver, now four-and-thirty years old, was 
harboring some rather lordly notions of the future of the Mis- 
sissippi. "As the seat of empire," he says, "from time imme- 
morial has been gradually progressive towards the West, there 
is no doubt but tliat, at some future period, mighty kingdoms 
will emerge from these wildernesses, and stately palaces and 
solemn temples supplant the Indian huts." In this frame of 
mind, and three years after the Peace of Paris, he had deter- 
mined to probe the great western mysteries, and started from 
Boston in June, 1766, on a quest for he hardly knew what. Ar- 
riving at Mackinac, the westernmost of the English posts, he 



102 



THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 



secured some goods for presents to the Indians and, on Sep- 
tember 3, he proceeded by tlie Green Bay portage and, entering 
the Mississippi, turned north and, passing the Falls of St. 
Anthony, reached his northernmost point at the St. Francis 
River. When near the site of the modern city of St. Paul, 
he comprehended what he conceived to be the vantage-ground 




JONATHAN CARVER. 

[From liis Travels, London, 1781.] 

of that pivotal region of the northern valley of the Mississippi, 
with its down-current access to the Gulf of Mexico, and by the 
Iberville River to Mobile and Pensacola. Looking to the east, 
he dreamed of a water-way, yet to be made practicable, through 
the lakes to New York. Towards the setting sun, an up-current 
struggle along the Minnesota River might reveal some distant 
portage or centring water, whence a descending stream would 
carry the trader to the Pacific on his way to China. At a later 
day, Carver's heirs claimed that, as evidence of his confidence in 
the future of this spot, he had acquired from the Sioux a title 



JONATHAN CARVER. 103 

to the site of St. Paul, but unquestionable evidence of any deed 
was never produced. The British held it to be a transaction 
in contravention of the proclamation of 1763, and later, the 
United States, succeeding to all rights, through the Committee 
on Public Lands reported adversely on the claim in 1823 to the 
Senate of the United States. It was Carver's notion that the 
continent was broadest on the parallel which went athwart this 
commanding region, about the mouth of the Minnesota, which 
was almost midway in the passage from sea to sea. Here was 
destined to be a seat of British power. One of his maps marks 
out a north and south belt, bounded by the Mississippi on the 
west and by the meridian of Detroit on the east, and stretch- 
ing from the Chickasaw country on the south to the Chippewas 
and Ottawas on the north. Within this area he pricks out the 
bound of eleven prospective colonies of English. On the east, 
the Ohio and other tributaries of the Great River opened the 
way for these prospective populations to the passes of the Alle- 
ghanies and the old colonies of the seaboard. Carver found the 
country north of the Illinois and as far as the Wisconsin little 
known to the traders, and charged the French with having 
deceived the English about it in their maps. Farther north, up 
to the Mille Lacs region and the springs of the Mississippi, he 
still found the French maps at variance with the Indian reports. 

It was here at the north, within a radius of thirty miles or 
less, that Carver placed the great continental divide, and in the 
midst of the best of hunting countries, where the white man 
had not yet penetrated. From this point, he said, one could go 
east by streams that connect with Lake Superior and the 
water-ways leading to the Atlantic. One went north from Red 
Lake through Winnipeg and the Bourbon River to Hudson's 
Bay, making the passage to Europe through Davis's Strait, as 
has been advocated in our day. 

Just south of these northern springs lay the White Bear 
Lake, with a passage from it open to the Gulf of Mexico. In 
either direction there was a route of not far from two thousand 
miles, as he calculated, to the salt sea. Speaking of the conti- 
guity of these sources, and referring to a belief, long current, 
of a common source for streams flowing to different seas, he 
says : " I perceived a visibly distinct separation in all of them, 
notwithstanding in some places they approached so near that 



104 THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

I could have stepped from one to the other." In one of his 
maps, close by this source of the Mississippi, Carver places 
a smaller lake, out of which flows the "Origan" River, — a 
name now first used, — which, becoming in its passage the great 
river of the west, — the ultimate Columbia, — debouches at last 
somewhat vaguely into the Pacific near the Straits of Anian, 
a supposable northwest passage, long known in speculations. 
This was to be the great western outlet of his manifold colonies 
of the Mississippi basin. This seaside spot was already i)re- 
empted for the English, as he avers, by the discoveries of Sir 
Francis L^-ake, while to this distant west the trails of French 
fur-traders for nearly a century running from Prairie du Chien, 
near the mouth of the Wisconsin, had opened a land carriage in 
the same direction. 

Carver himself explored but a single one of the western 
affluents of the Mississippi, and that was the St. Peter, as the 
Minnesota was then called. It was on this water among the 
Sioux of the plains that he passed the winter of 1766, and he 
says he found that the French had prejudiced that tribe against 
the English. Of the physiography of the more distant west, 
he gives us some hints as he got them from the savages, the 
marked feature of which is unbounded plains " which probably 
terminate on the coast of the Pacific." The spur of the Rocky 
Mountains discovered by Verendrye is, to Carver's mind, nothing 
but an isolated " mountain of bright stones " lying north of the 
river of the west. It was in a lake near this mountain that 
he makes the Assiniboils River rise, which, flowing to Lake 
Winnipeg, is next carried on with a divided current, the one to 
Hudson's Bay and the other to Lake Superior. He hears of 
natives, living beyond this mountain, small of stature, using 
vessels of gold, and suo^cestino- an emigration north from Mex- 
ico. With a mixed burden on his mind of speculation and 
knowledge, and having failed to receive the goods from Mack- 
inac which he expected, Carver, in the summer of 1767, began 
to retrace his steps. After lingering some time at Lake Pepin 
he sought the Chippewa River, and ascending it, crossed a port- 
age which took him by a descending stream to Lake Su])erior 
near its western end. Carver's observations put Lake Supe- 
rior between 46° and 49° north latitude, not far from its true 
position, a correction of earlier English maps by something 



'A''/-/,. 



'////;, 



■:'7 



,..^' 



X i- 

















■ s %^ '/lt.'""l 



\ // /• / 



■M,? 















CARVER'S COLONIES. 

[From a "New Map of North Ainorica, 1778," in Jonathan Carver's Travels thrnvgh the 
Interior Parts of Xnrth America. London, 1781. It sliow.s also tlie connection of Lake Superior 
with the Lake of the Woods and Hudson's Bay (James's Bay).] 



106 THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

like eight degrees, while Kitchin, who a few years later, in 1774 
and before Carver's maps were published, was out by nearly 
ten degrees, — both carrying the water by so much too far to 
the north. In contour and detail there had been up to this 
time no map of this lake so accurate as its first survey made 
by the Jesuits a century before. All the intervening maps had 
shown many islands spotting its surface. In Carver's time a 
similar ignorance of the interior spaces of the lake prevailed. 
It was due, perhaps, to the barkentines of the French keeping 
near the shoi-es, and to the Indians' dread of enchantments 
with which they supposed such islands to be invested. 

Passing through the Sault Ste. Marie in October, 1767, 
Carver moved eastwai'd by the lakes, and after an absence of 
two years and five months reached Boston in October, 1768, 
having traversed, as he reckoned, a course of near seven thou- 
sand miles. He tells us that an English gentleman, Richard 
Whitworth, became so interested in the traveler's views of the 
way to find a passage from the Mississippi to the Pacific that, 
in 1774, he nearly perfected arrangements for doing it, in 
company with Carver himself and a party of fifty or sixty 
men, when the opening scenes of the Revolutionary War put a 
stop to the enterprise. A proposition made by Bernard Romans, 
in 1773, met with a like discouragement. Carver's narrative 
was not published till ten years later, in 1778, when his recital 
found neither England nor her colonies in any better position 
to profit by his experiences. 

While Carver's book was still in manuscript, and he had been 
seeking government employ as an Indian agent in the region 
west of Lake Huron, the future of the Mississippi had been 
consigned to other hands than his prospective colonists of the 
eleven provinces. 

Spain still controlled the French of Louisiana. In New 
Orleans this alien power had proved vexatious. In the upper 
parts of the valley the French had no love for the English ; but 
it was a question whether the Spanish rule was not annoying- 
enough sometimes to give some hope to Gage that a part, at 
least, of those who had fled across the river might return to the 
English. A few years after the Englisli commanding general 
had expressed this anticipation, the progress of the American 



ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND SPAIN. 107 

revolt had interjected a vigilant power in the yonng confeder- 
ation between the English on the one side and the French 
and Spanish on the other. Such conditions foreboded a new 
struggle for the possession of the Mississippi and its eastern 
affluents, but with complications greater than had attended the 
conflict which was ended by the Peace of Paris in 1763. It 
was once more a question, who should control or share the vast 
country lying between the Appalachians and the Great River ? 
Each power entei*ed upon the struggle with its own purpose. 
In the north, England early (1774) attempted a preemption of 
the region above the Ohio through the Quebec Bill. France at 
once saw that the terms of that legislation recognized her own 
long-defended claim to include that territory within the bounds 
of Canada. It was plainly to be seen that such an acknowledg- 
ment might make it easier for France to wrest that country in 
its entirety from the grasp of England, if the fortunes of war 
should lay open to her the chances of a diplomatic triumph 
over England. In the south there were the rival interests of 
England and Spain. The possession of West Florida and New 
Orleans respectively brought these two powers into a dangerous 
contiguity. Events seemed tending to bring on a conflict, either 
at New Orleans or higher up the river. It was a question for 
the young Republic, if in these opposing interests, north and 
south, she could make good her territorial rights beyond the 
Alleghanies, to an extent equal to what, as colonies, she had 
contended for, and wliich the treaty of 1763 had recognized. 

All these complications involved the relations of the American 
people not only to England, which was trying to subjugate them, 
but also to France, which was expected to assist them. It was a 
matter of more serious concern that the rulers of France had no 
intention of resisting England for any other purpose than re- 
venge and profit to France. The relations of the young Repub- 
lic to Spain were more embarrassing, for any assistance from 
that country depended upon the Bourbon compact between 
France and Spain proving broad enoiigh to force the latter 
countiy into a war with England for the behoof of France in 
An)erica. In this event, a common hostility to England might 
league the American rei)ublic and the Spanish monarchy. 

In this impending struggle for the line of the Mississippi, 
as bounding the nascent commonwealth, America had military 



108 THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

resources almost ludici'ously inadequate, and success was only 
to be acquired by using this Bourbon rivalry of England in such 
a way as would protect American interests. 

Oliver Pollock, a native of Pennsylvania of Irish stock, had 
gone as a young man to Havana to engage in business, and 
removed, when he was about thirty years old, to New Orleans 
in 1767. Two years later, when O'Reilly took possession and 
the number of his troops produced a famine, this American 
merchant received a cargo of flour from Baltimore. 

Prices of cereals were ruling high ; but Pollock saw his 
opportunity, and publicly sold his produce at from half to two 
thirds of the current rates. The Spanish government marked 
its gratitude by giving Pollock a license of free trade with the 
colony for the rest of his life. The concession gave him a 
standing in New Orleans, which was of importance for Pollock's 
counti-ymen in the approaching crisis. 

The Spanish authorities at this time were strengthening the 
ramparts of New Orleans, and were bringing succor nearer by 
opening a new route to Mexico, for it had not escaped them 
that England only needed a pretext to capture New Orleans if 
she could. The English reciprocated the anxiety, and found 
the Spanish possession of Havana a constant menace to Pen- 
sacola, Haldimand, when commanding at this latter post, had 
been made aware by Grage, writing from his New York head- 
quarters, that it was wise never to let slip the pui-pose of seiz- 
ing New Orleans, if opportunity offered. The canalization of 
the Iberville had not indeed proved a prosperous scheme for 
diverting trade to Florida, and the navigation of the Missis- 
sippi was but a vexatious privilege to the English. When 
there had been, in 1770, a passing diplomatic flurry with Spain, 
over the Falkland Islands, Gage had cautioned Haldimand 
to be prepared for a hostile movement, if there was any ojipar- 
tune turn of the negotiations. It had long been Gage's plan for 
stop])ing the clandestine traffic across the river by holding its 
mouth, which he contended was the only way in which the trade 
of the river could properly be developed in the English interest. 

Note. — Tlie opposite map is a section from a "Carte de la Floride, etc., poiir le service des 
vaisseaux du Roi, par ordre de M. de Sartine, conseiller d'Etat, 1778," and shows Haldimand's 
Iberville route. 














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. (^ 






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,' 


^ 


- 




V 

^^- 




/I 







no THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

Mucli to the discontent of the British settlers at Natchez and 
elsewhere, he had refused, with New Orleans in Spanish hands, 
to maintain armed posts for their protection. 

The English possessions in West Florida, as the bounds of 
that province had been defined, included the country about 
Natchez. The population in this region had been increasing 
since 1770. Some of the French in Louisiana, disaffected by 
the Spanish rule, had passed over the river to the English side ; 
but the greater j^art of the increase had been emigrants from 
east of the Appalachians. Some had come from Pennsylvania 
and Jersey ; others from Virginia and Carolina ; but larger 
numbers had come from Connecticut, turning a current of emi- 
gration which, under more favorable circumstances, might have 
settled the Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania. General Phineas 
Lyman, whom we have seen in London a few years before 
unsuccessfully urging the formation of a colony in the Illinois 
country, had returned to New England in the faith that a grant 
which he had urged for the soldiers of the late war would be 
made on the lower Mississippi, under royal orders to the gov- 
ernor of West Florida. He had in Dece;.nber, 1772, asked Dart- 
mouth to encourage their plan. With this expectation he had 
induced a body of " military adventurers " at Hartford to order 
a reconnoissance of their proposed home, and in 1773, Lyman 
and party sailed from New York for Pensacola. Here they 
found that no royal instructions had been received. Pending 
the expected arrival of such, Rufus Putnam, as topographer, 
headed a party to explore the Mississippi as far north as the 
Yazoo. The wished-for orders still not coming, the proposing 
settlers agreed to purchase a tract of land on easy terms. The 
result was that several hundi'ed families, in May, 1776, came 
out from New England, only to find that even this arrange- 
ment had been forbidden by orders from England. So the 
struggling settlers found that they must shift for themselves. 
There were some among them who scantily sympathized with 
the political revolt in New England, and Lyman himself had 
congratulated the ministry that the " spirit of Boston " was 
not spreading. The new homes, which they too rosily pic- 
tured, were destined, they thought, to give them a release from 
the turmoil they had left. There was, however, enough of tlie 
revolutionary fervor of the Atlantic seaboard in others who had 



HAMILTON'S RAIDS. Ill 

settled there to make an important factor iu shaping the des- 
tiny of this southern region. 

We have seen that Hamilton at Detroit had had some suc- 
cess in counteracting the influence of Morgan among the north- 
ern tribes. Though the Delawares had mainly rejected his 
hatchet, the Shawnees and Wyaudots had generally accepted 
it. A comparison of dates seems to show that Hamilton was 
acting in anticipation of orders which he had asked of Ger- 
main. These, when received (dated March 26, 1777), conformed 
to Hamilton's suggestions, and directed him to organize Indian 
raids against the American frontiers. We have his own state- 
ment, in the following July, that he had up to that date sent out 
fifteen distinct parties on such fiendish errands. The purpose 
of the minister was that those loyal to the crown among the 
frontier folk should be gathered in bands, and should be encour- 
aged by a bounty of two hundred acres to each to aid in these 
marauding exploits. Dunmore had made out a list of such 
loyal adherents, as known to him, which Germain transmitted 
to Hamilton. The purpose of all this deviltry, except so far 
as they hoped to profit by the savage sympathy, was to distract 
the attention of Congress and diminish the numbers of Wash- 
ington's main army. 

The Kentucky posts, with a population, perhaps, of six hun- 
dred, and only a half of them arms-bearing, had grown confident 
in their seclusion. Morgan, who was now commandino' at Fort 
Pitt, had represented to headquarters in January, 1777, that if 
militia were drafted to take the place of the garrisons at Forts 
Pitt and Randolph, the regular companies doing duty there 
could be sent to reinforce the eastern army. Such self-reliance 
gave Hamilton what he thought an opportunity. Some two 
hundred of his Indians crossed the Ohio. One horde unsuc- 
cessfully attacked Harrodsburg (March, 1777), the garrison re- 
ceiving a few hours' warning. Another, consisting of about a 
hundred Avarriors, was repulsed at Boonesborough (April 24). 
Before May was passed, they again fell upon the stockade which 
Boone had erected, and began on May 30 a more protracted 
siege of Logan's Fort, — the modern Standford. — which ended 
.j only with the relief whicli Colonel Bowman and a hundred 
ll Virginians brought to it in August, as he was scouring the 



112 THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

country in search of the foe. The Indians contrived to con- 
vey Hamilton's prochiniation to repentant rebels, by leaving 
it on the body of a man whom they had killed outside the 
fort. 

By the first of June, 1777, Hamilton at Detroit and General 
Edward Hand at Pittsburg — now in command of the western 
frontier — were each developing- their counter movements for 
the summer's campaign. 

The Americans had begun preparations in the spring by send- 
ing Philadelphia boat-builders to the Monongahela, to make 
ready some bateaux. Early in the summer, American agents at 
the Holston River had sought to protect the valley approaches 
on that side by a pact with the southern Indians. The main 
outposts of Pittsburg, subject to Hand's control, were Fort 
Randolph on Point Pleasant at the mouth of the Kanawha, 
and Fort Henry at the modern Wheeling. Two hundred and 
fifty men of Colonel Wood's regiment were garrisoning these 
posts. Of the neighboring Indians only the Delawares con- 
tinued friendly, and they were kept in restraint lai'gely through 
the influence of Zeisberger, the Moravian. 

The English were fortunate in holding Niagara, a position 
which, as Hutchins said of it, " secured a greater number of 
comnumications through a large country than probably any 
other pass in interior America," and it was here, just at this 
turn of affairs, that the Indians were gathering to assist St. 
Leger, in that attempt to aid Burgoyne which was foiled at 
Oriskany. Detroit, however, was the chief strategic point for 
the English ; and Hamilton, now in command there, was later 
put, by orders from England, in chief control of the military 
affairs in the Ohio valley. His main business was to harass 
the frontiers, open communication with Stuart at the south, 
and watch the Spaniards beyond the Mississippi. His outposts 
were at Sandusky and about the headwaters of the Scioto, and 
he had succeeded, as we have said, in banding the Shawnees, 
Wyandots, and Mingoes in the British interest. 

It was Hamilton's purpose, if possible, to organize a corps 
of chasseurs from the French settlers within his control, and 
to officer them from their own peojile. An English officer, 
Abbott by name, was early in the season started towards Viu- 



ROCHEBLAVE. 113 

cennes, with some such purpose. When he ci-ossed the portage 
of the Maumee, he found five hundred Indians there ready for 
their savage raids. In the absence of any troops to support 
him, Abbott, who had readied his post on May 19, found that 
he had to yield to their exorbitant demands, and in July (1777), 
while he was stockading Vincennes, he found it necessary to 
bind the French settlers by an oath and forego the chasseurs. 
The other purpose of intercepting the American supplies by 
the river seemed hardly more promising. The cannon which 
he mounted were sent to him by the commander at Fort Gage 
in the Illinois country, to which the armament of Fort Chartres 
had been removed in 1772. This officer was Rocheblave, who 
had been for some time busy watching the Spanish at St. 
Louis, and trying to divine a purpose on their pirt which in 
his imagination took many shapes. He tried at times to induce 
the Kickapoos to unravel it, but it did not comfort him to find 
that these Indians were receiving messages from the " Boston- 
nais," as they called the Americans, and were communicating 
them to the Spaniards. Upon the Foxes both he and the Span- 
ish governor played their wiles in the effort to gain them, and 
to the savages' advantage, no doubt. The Ottawas were urged 
to receive Spanish favors, so that they could fathom, by the op- 
portunities which dependence could offer, the plots at St. Louis. 
Rocheblave seems to have made the best impression upon a 
vagrant horde of the Delawares, Avho frequented his post, and 
he reported that he felt he could depend upon them. But the 
belts which he found passing between the rebels and Spaniards 
on the one side, and the savages on the other, were a constant 
riddle to him. He had heard, moreover, that the Spanish com- 
mander had spoken knowingly of something that was to haj^pen 
wlien the maize grew to be eighteen inches high. Certain 
French officers, too, were known to have Spanish commissions, 
and he found that, despite his endeavors, French aid was ena- 
bling the Americans to run supplies up the river. 

Diu'ing all this Hamilton had submitted to Carleton a plan 
for attacking New Orleans ; but Carleton was cautious, and 
warned him not to be too i)rovoking with his neighbors, but 
rather to be prepared to resist any attack from them. Hamilton 
replied that the Si)anish hostility was confirmed, and they had 
begun to seize English vessels at New Orleans. 



114 THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

While the season closed at Kaskaskia with Rocheblave dream- 
ing of a Spanish conquest and a governorship at New Orleans, 
some bloody work was going on around the little fort near 
Wheeling Creek. This stockade had been known as Fort Fin- 
castle, till lately being improved (1776), it was renamed Fort 
Henry, after Patrick Henry, now governor of Virginia. Gen- 
eral Hand had not succeeded in raising the two thousand 
men which he had hoped for his campaign, and with no more 
than eight hundred men on his rolls he had not felt strong- 
enough to take the aggressive during the summer, and had 
accordingly kept himself rather on the defensive. He was, 
moreover, not quite sure of certain men who were about him. 
One of them, Alexander McKee, who had been deputy Indian 
agent under Sir William Johnson, was put under oath to have 
" no communication with the British." Simon Girty, who had 
also been arrested, had been wily enough to reestablish himself 
in Hand's opinion. Girty had for some time absented himself, 
but in August some friendly Moravian Indians had come in, 
bringing word that Girty was leading a force thither, and that 
Fort Henr}^ was to be the point of attack. This defense was 
an oblong stockade in open ground, inclosing about half an 
acre of ground, bastioned, and supplied with water. The occu- 
pants of the surrounding village were still in their cabins out- 
side the walls ; but scouts were out, and they had passed a quiet 
summer. As the season closed, confidence had been so far 
restored that some of the militia had gone home, and only two 
companies, of not over forty men in all, remained under Colonel 
David Shepherd. Hand did what he could to cover the inhab- 
itants before the stroke came. During the night of August 31, 
from two hundred to four hundred of Hamilton's Indians — 
accounts differ — ambushed themselves near by, and threw the 
community into confusion the next morning by a sudden ap- 
proach. There was time enough, however, to enable the out- 
side settlers to get within the defenses before the attack began. 
The garrison made some hazardous sallies, much to its loss of 
numbers ; but they served to keep the assailers at bay. The 
leader of the enemy, finding his followers discouraged, turned 
to destroying what he could in the surrounding village. Suc- 
cor for the besieged arriving, he disappeared with his savages 
in the forest. There is a good deal of confusion in the accounts 



EVENTS OF 1777. 115 

which have come down to us, and though Wither says that 
Girty was the leader of the assault, it is by no means certain 
that he was present at all. 

The whole region was soon alarmed, and Hand, uncertain 
for a while whether to make counter incursions, at last drew in 
the men from his lesser outposts. Kittanning, for one, was 
abandoned, and the season in this part of the valley ended 
with little hope. 

The neighboring Delawares had proved steadfast, but a band 
of Shawnees adhering to Cornstalk had wavered. That leader 
and some of his people a little later ventured to Fort Randolph, 
where some militia, aroused by recent atrocities, ensnared and 
murdered them. It was hopeless to keep any of the Shawnees 
neutral after this. 

The campaign of 1777, in Washington's loss of Philadeljihia, 
had not been propitious for those struggling beyond the moun- 
tains, who were thus cut off from their main seaboard connec- 
tions ; but the defeat of St. Leger and the surrender of Bur- 
goyne at the north had happily intervened to put a new aspect 
upon the contest of the trans-Alleghany country, where so much 
desultory warfare had of late confused the outcome. 



CHAPTER VIII, 

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, ARBITER AND SUPPLIANT. 

1776-1779. 

In the early part of 1776, George Rogers Clark had cast his 
lot among the Keiitiickians. He found them living amid dan- 
gers and stirred by political unrest. Virginia, as the parent 
colony, was too remote to afford them protection. There were 
ugly rumors of savage contests in store for them through the 
concerted action of the British commanders at Detroit and 
Pensacola. There were those on the frontiers — and it suited 
Clark's nature to be in sympathy — who would not shrink 
from the responsibility of independent action ; but a soberer 
judgment prevailed, and it was decided not to take any decisive 
step before the authorities at Williamsburg were informed of 
the situation. On July 17, 1776, delegates from these forest 
communities met at Harrodsburg and chose Clark and another 
to undertake such an embassy. The people had already, on 
June 20, drawn up a memorial, in which they affirmed that the 
" prime riflemen " of Kentucky were not a body whose aidl 
should be declined in troublous times. They recognized that 
the colonies were drifting towards that independence of whose 
declaration it was too early then for them to have heard. The 
delegates found difficulty, without intimating an alternative 
of their own independence, to make the council listen to their 
demands for powder ; but Patrick Henry, then governor, as 
well as Jefferson, George Mason, and George Wythe, threw a 
strong influence in favor of the frontiers, and the grant was 
made. On August 2, the Assembly was induced to declare the 
sovereignty of Virginia over the Kentucky region, and her 
purj)ose to protect it. Later, the legislature, on December 7, 
created the county of Kentucky. 

During the spring of 1777, the tidings from the Indian 
country north of the Ohio had alarmed Colonel Crawford at 



i 



CLARK'S PLANS. Ill 

Fort Pitt. When the summer of)ened, Clark sent two young 
hunters to make their way to the Illinois settlements, and to 
discover the situation there. They reported on their return 
(June 22) that the French were in the main quiet in their 
villages, and that only a few of their young men were partici- 
pating in the British and savage raids, which were directed 
from Detroit. These centres of the French population were, 
however, used as starting-places of these marauding parties. 
Clark was fired by these reports with a purpose to attempt the 
conquest of this region, and on October 1 he again left Har- 
rodsburg for the Virginia capital. He tells us that he met on 
his way many adventurers struggling through the wilderness to 
find new homes. When he reached Williamsburg, he found 
the community rejoicing over the surrender of Burgoyne, — a 
good omen that gave him increased enthusiasnio 

On December 10, 1777, Clark laid his scheme before the 
governor. In case of failure in the plan, he proposed to join 
the Spaniards beyond the Mississippi. The Virginia council 
having approved Clark's plan, on January 2, 1778, the governor 
gave Clark a colonel's commission, and committed to him two 
sets of instructions, one expressing a purpose to defend Ken- 
tucky only, and the other, which was to be kept secret, author- 
izing him to attack Kaskaskia. In both he was given author- 
ity to raise, west of the AUeghanies, seven companies of forty 
men each. He was to apply to General Hand, who, a§ we have 
seen, had been in command at Fort Pitt since June 1, 1777, for 
a portion of the stock of powder which had been brought up 
the Mississippi from New Orleans, and such other supplies 
as could be furnished. Twelve hundred dollars in paper were 
given to him, and he was told to draw for further sums on 
Oliver Pollock at New Orleans, who would be instructed to 
honor his drafts. The legislature of Virginia, as Jefferson, 
Mason, and Wythe in their letters of congratulation assured him, 
was expected to appropriate as bounty to each man three hun- 
dred acres of the conquered territory. So the whole movement 
was a Virginia one, intended to secure her dominion over what 
she believed to be her charter limits. The men were enlisted 
under the impression conveyed by his public instructions. 
Three companies were raised, one hundred and fifty men in all, 
and these were rendezvoused at Redstone on the Monongahela, 



118 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

where the boats were assembled. In May, 1778, having beside 
his troops a train of adventurous settlers, Clark moved on 
to Pittsburg and Wheeling. At both these places he picked up 
supplies. At the mouth o£ the Kanawha he found reinforce- 
ments. On his way down the Ohio, some of the accompanying 
emigrants left him at points where they could easily enter the 
wilderness. Others remained on the flotilla till May 27, when 
he reached the falls, near the modern Louisville. Here they 
were landed on Corn Island, where the rushing river broke up 
the reflections of canebrakes, vines, and lofty trees. A stockade 
was built to protect the eighty settlers, and to furnish a store- 
house for his excess of supplies. Ten of his soldiers were left 
as a guard. He had lost something by desertion on the way, 
and was glad of a small company from the Holston, which 
now joined him. They did not prove steadfast, however, for as 
soon as he made known his real instructions, they left him. 
His total available force had now been reduced to about one 
hundred and seventy-five men. If it had been larger, he might 
at once have advanced on Vincennes ; but hoping for other 
accessions, he determined to go to Kaskaskia first. 

While making his preparations to leave, intelligence of the 
French alliance reached him from Fort Pitt. It was good 
tidings which he hoped to break to the French at Kaskaskia 
with some effect. On June 24, he poled his boats up the river 
from the island in order to gain the main channel, and then, 
it being a high stage of the water, the flotilla shot down the 
rapids " at the very moment of the sun being in a great eclipse." 
It was a nearly total obscuration, and it was nine o'clock in 
the morning. It took two days to reach a creek just above 
Fort Massac, relays of rowers working day and night. He met 
on the way some hunters, who the week before had been in 
Kaskaskia, and engaged one or two of them as guides. 

The men were landed, and there was not a horse or cannon 
among them to give a show of efficacy to the courageous little 
array. It was on June 26 that they began their march over a 
route of one hundred and twenty miles, the first fifty of which 
lay through a swampy country. The open prairie, which came 
next, encouraged them in their weariness. On the afternoon 
of July 4, they were within three miles of Kaskaskia, and their 
food was exhausted. That post was in command of Rocheblave, 



CLARK TAKES K A SKA SKI A. 



119 







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la w r * > , J 












-^ .'^ &■■ 1*1 .-XT 1* '^^^ , 








4 ,>, ' - ^^ 



I fte S" •'•2 ^* f 




[From CoUot's Atlas.'] 

a French officer who had joined the British after tliey had oc- 
cupied the region. To save expense, and without much appre- 
hension of th^ exposure of the post, its garrison had been 
greatly diminished, and Kocheblave had been kept there to 
watch the country and report upon events. The men that were 
left to him were in the guard hall of the fort making merry in 
a dance when Clark, after dark, and accompanied by his men, 
suddenly sprung into their company. There could be no resist- 



120 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

ance, and " the self-styled Colonel, Mr. Clerke," as Rocheblave 
reported liim to Carleton, was thus easily put in possession of 
the post and of all within the town. The next morning the 
oath of fidelity was administered. After this the townspeople, 
whose spirits were distinctly gladdened by the news of the 
French alliance, wei'e suffered to go about their business. 

The successful commander now turned for sympathy to the 
Si^anish over the Mississippi, with whom he opened communi- 
cation. He found the commandant at St. Louis more than 
ready to countenance him. Wherever he turned, the French 
about him were ready to serve him. They had much disturbed 
Rocheblave of late by keeping up a trade with the Spaniards, 
which that officer was powerless to stop. With Kaskaskia in 
American hands, there was nothing to prevent such traffic across 
the Mississippi being carried on openly. 

Clark went to Cahokia — to which he had sent Bowman and 
thirty horsemen on the first day of his occupation of Kaskaskia 
— and met the northern Indians, and though he ran some 
hazards and encountered some treachery, the French stood by 
him, and in outward seeming, at least, the tribes were gained 
over. He sent a commission to the chief of the distant Foxes, 
but the British intercepted it. 

Gibault, a priest at Kaskaskia, in company with Dr. Lafont 
and a few others whom Clark could trust, was sent, on July 
14, to Vincennes. Lieutenant Leonard Helm was also of the 
party, and was detailed to take the military command of the 
place. He administered the oath to those he found, and sent 
belts to the neighboring Wabash Indians. 

Gibault returned to Kaskaskia on August 1, and reported 
his success. Clark now enlisted enough resident Creoles to 
supply the gaps in his companies, made by the expiration of 
the term of his three months' men. The men thus released 
were sent to Virginia under an officer, who also took charge 
of Rocheblave as a prisoner of war. 

There soon arrived from St. Louis a man in whom Clark 
found a fast friend. This was Francois Vigo, a native of 
Sardinia, now a man somewhat over thirty years of age, accord- 
ing to the best accounts, though his gravestone makes him born 
in 1739. He liad come to New Orleans in a Spanish regiment, 
early in the days of the Spanish control. After leaving the 



POLLOCK AND VIGO. 121 

army he turned trader, and had of late been living at St. Louis, 
where he had become a person of influence and property. 
Hearino- of Clark's success, he had hastened to Kaskaskia to 
see him. Without the financial aid of Vigo at St. Louis and 
of Pollock at New Orleans, it is doubtful if Clark could have 
sustained himself in the coming months. Governor Henry had 
already directed Pollock to draw on France for money to be 
sent to Clark, and at a later day Clark gave an ajffidavit that he 
received Pollock's remittances in specie. Li September, 1778, 
Pollock wrote to Congress that he had just sent a new remittance 
of seven thousand three hundred dollars to Clark. During that 
year he borrowed a large amount from the Spanish governor 
for like uses. Vigo let Clark have twelve thousand dollars, 
and took Clark's drafts on Pollock for that sum. When these 
drafts reached New Orleans, Pollock, who had been sending 
powder and swivels up the river to Clark, found himself obliged 
to raise money at 12^- per cent, discount to meet the obligation. 
Later, Pollock drew on Delap of Bordeaux on account of a 
cargo shipped to that port, in order to amass funds for Clark's 
continued drafts. Fearing that the vessel might not arrive and 
Delap would dishonor his draft, he solicited Congress in April, 
1779, to direct Franklin, then in Paris, to assume if necessary 
the burden. Transactions like these before the close of the war 
reduced Pollock to penury. When Vigo died at Terre Haute 
in 1836, neglected and childless, something like twenty thou- 
sand dollars which he had paid to Clark remained unsettled. 
Ten years later (1846), Vigo's heirs memorialized Congress for 
restitution, but with little effect. In 1848, a conmiittee of the 
House of Representatives recognized the obligation. Here the 
matter rested till 1872, when Congress referred the question to 
the Court of Claims, which gave a decision in favor of Vigo's 
heirs. The government carried the case to the Supreme Court 
in 1876, when long-delayed justice was rendered, but the appli- 
cants who received, including interest, fifty thousand dollars, 
were mainly claim agents and lobbyists. The particular draft 
which was the basis of the suit was one drawn on Pollock, 
December 4, 1778, for 18716.40, which Vigo had cashed. 

While Clark was thus engaged securing funds, measures 
were in progress to organize the conquered territory under a 



122 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

civil government. The provisions were quite at variance with 
the purpose which the English ministry had had in view iu 
pushing through the Quebec Bill, and threw back the bounds 
of Canada, where both the colonists and the parent government 
had long, through many wars, insisted that they belonged. 
The Virginia Assembly, in the autumn of 1778, had here 
created the county of Illinois, and had given to Governor 
Henry the authority to raise five hundred men for its defense, 
and to keep open communication with and through it. 

Henry selected, as governor of the new county, an active 
Virginian, who had gone, in 1775, to Kentucky, where he had 
played a part in the Transylvania movement, and had later 
been in Clark's command, — Captain John Todd. Henry sent 
him instructions which required him " to cultivate and emulate 
the affections of the French and Indians," to command the 
county militia, and to use them to assist Clark. Todd, on 
receiving these papers, returned to Virginia to perfect plans, 
and when he again reached Kaskaskia in May, 1779, he bore 
a letter of friendship to the Spanish governor at Ste. Genevieve, 
which he was expected to deliver in person. He was also en- 
joined to take under his special care the family of Rocheblave, 
now a prisoner in Virginia. In appointing the county officers, 
Todd was quite ready to give the French a large part of them, 
and he endeavoi-ed to fill the country with actual settlers, to the 
exclusion of speculators in land. 

It was a relief to Clark to find the civil administriation of 
the region in so good hands, for events were demanding his 
anxious attention. 

All along the valley north of the Ohio, the American cause 
had not pi'ospered, and in Kentucky there had been turmoil 
enough, though it was not always favorable to the British and 
their savage allies. During the summer there were bands of 
Tories, horse thieves, and other renegades, traversing the Ten- 
nessee country. The Watauga community, bestirring itself, 
had mustered and sent out two companies of militia. These 
effectually scoured the country, and those of the marauders 
who were not captured fled to the Cherokees, or escaped north- 
ward to the British. 

There was now only a hunter's hut on the site of the later 



BOONESBOROUGH. 123 

Nashville, and perhaps a dozen families were clustered about 
Bledsoe's Lick, stockaded together and surrounded by Chick- 
asaws. These were relieved. Farther north, however, at 
Boonesborough, Hamilton, through his rangers and savages, 
tried hard to deliver a serious blow. 

Boone, who had been earlier captured at the Salt Licks, 
had been taken to Detroit, where Hamilton treated him con- 
siderately. Later he was carried into the Shawnee country 
a jirisoner, and succeeded in ingratiating himself with his mas- 
ters. Here he learned that Hamilton had gathered a band of 
over four hundred warriors, and was intending to let them loose 
upon the Kentucky settlements. In June, managing to escape, 
Boone reached his home in time to improve its defenses. The 
enemy not appearing, and anxious for definite knowledge, 
Boone started out with a squad of men to reconnoitre. He 
crossed the Ohio, and had a sharp conflict with the Indians 
on the Scioto. Learning that Hamilton's expedition was now 
on the march, led by both French and British officers and fly- 
ing the flags of both, it soon became a race for the goal. Boone 
surpassed them in speed, and reached Boonesborough in time to 
drive in the cattle and dispose his forty effective men for the 
onset. He had a score other men not equal to a steady fight. 

The enemy approached the fort on September 8, 1778, — if 
this is the date, for there is a conflict of testimony. The leader, 
whom Boone calls Du Quesne, but whom the English call De 
Quindre, demanded a parley. This was accorded by Boone, 
only to find it had been treacherously asked for, and he and his 
men, who went to the meeting, had a struggle to escape the 
snare. Gaining the stockade, the siege began, and lasted sev- 
eral days, till the enemy finally disappeared in the woods. This 
repulse and the raid of the Watauga men relieved the region 
south of the Ohio to the end of the year. 

Farther east, however, results had not been so cheering. In 
May, 1778, Congress had voted to raise three thousand men for 
service on the western frontiers. It was hoped that it might 
prove practicable to push this force across the country south of 
Lake Erie and ca]>ture Detroit. General Hand was relieved, 
and General Lachlan Mcintosh, a Scotchman, now somewhat 
over fifty years old, who had been with Oglethorpe in Georgia, 



124 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

and had attracted Washington's attention, was assigned to the 
command at Fort Pitt. Washington, at Valley Forge, had 
ordered the Eighth Pennsylvania regiment, under Colonel Brod- 
head, to the frontiers, and the Thirteenth Virginia regiment, 
under Colonel Gibson, was directed to be in readiness. Vir- 
ginia was at the same time expected to concentrate a large 
force of militia. This army, when ready, was to advance in 
two divisions of about fifteen hundred men each, — one by the 
Kanawha and the other by the Ohio, and to vmite at Fort 
Randolph (Point Pleasant). News had already been received 
of an attack by two hundred savages, in May, at the mouth of 
the Kanawha, and later on the Greenbrier ; but the assailants 
had been foiled at both places. 

It was well into June, 1778, when Mcintosh began his march, 
but the ravages which were taking place in the Wyoming 
valley rendered it necessary to detach for a while Brodhead's 
command. It was August when the general, with this dimin- 
ished force, reached his headquarters at the forks of the Ohio. 
Before he was ready to move on, Brodhead rejoined him. 

There were at this time three main posts west of the Alle- 
ghanies, — Forts Pitt, Kandolph, and Hand ; but there were 
beside nearly two-score movable camps of rangers, who were 
patrolling the border. Mcintosh called them in, and hoped 
with his force thus strengthened to advance on Detroit. It 
was necessary to his plan to leave friendly tribes behind him, 
and at Pittsburg, on September 17, with a supply of ten thou- 
sand dollars' worth of presents, he began conciliatory methods 
with the Delawares, who were stretched along his expected path. 
The Moravians had pretty well established themselves among 
these Indians, though not so effectually but that a part of this 
heterogeneous people stood aloof in the British interests. The 
enemy had a firm foothold among the Shawnees who occupied 
the lower valleys of the Great and Little Miami and of the 
Scioto. The upper waters of these same streams were given 
over to tlie inimical Mingoes. Beyond these were the Wyan- 
dots on the Sandusky — not always steadfast in the English 
interests — and the Ottawas on the Maumee, whom Hamilton 
could better depend upon. Mcintosh tried to gather these hos- 
tile tribes to a conference, but fewer came than he had wished. 
Nevertheless, he thought he had gained over enough for his 



MCINTOSH'S MARCH. 125 

purpose, and the Sliawnees had consented to his traversing their 
country. But in doing this he had lost time, and the season 
was become inauspicious for an active campaign. Accordingly 
he began the erection of a fort on the right bank of the Ohio, 
thirty miles below Fort Pitt, and near the mouth of Beaver 
Creek. Here, at Fort Mcintosh, as he called it, he established 
his headquarters on October 8, 1778. It was a good position 
to afford succor, when necessary, to the settlements which had 
already begun to extend to the Muskingum, and thirty miles 
up that river. The new fort was the first built north of the 
Ohio, and Mcintosh had, in and around it, a body of twelve 
hundred or more soldiers, mainly Virginians, — a larger number 
of armed men than had before operated in this country. His 
delay here in building what Brodhead, his successor, called a 
"romantic" fort was thought to have prevented the main ob- 
ject of his campaign, — the capture of Detroit. 

Mcintosh, checked in his advance as he was, had got far 
ahead of his trains. A herd of cattle, which was driven after 
him, did not come up till November 3, when there was still a 
lack in his supplies of salt and other things. Two days later, 
the general started again, but with cattle to drive and other 
obstacles, he made only fifty miles in a fortnight, and was then 
sufficiently ahead of his main supplies to cause alarm, for there 
were rumors of an opposing force. He was following pretty 
much the route which Bouquet had taken fourteen years before. 
He had not met the enemy ; but fearing concealed dangers, and 
needing a nearer refuge than Fort Mcintosh, in case of disaster, 
and believing in the policy of holding the country by a chain of 
posts, he built a stockade on the west branch of the Tuscara- 
was, an affluent of the Muskingum, and named it Fort Laurens, 
after the president of Congress. Its site was near the modern 
Bolivia and close to a spot where Bouqiiet had built a stockade, 
some distance above the Moravian settlements. 

This was Mcintosh's farthest point, and Detroit was safe, for, 
without sup])Hes and the season far gone, there was no longer 
hope to reach his goal. He put a bold fighter. Colonel John 
Gibson, in command of the post, with a force of one hundred 
and fifty men, to be used, if possible, in another advance in the 
spring. In December, the general returned to Fort Pitt, put 
his regulars into winter quarters, and sent his militia to their 



126 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

homes. The year had ended with the American hopes nearly- 
dashed in the upper regions of the Ohio valley. 

Farther west the enemy had made a bold stroke against 
Clark. It looked all the more serious, if the British attack on 
Savannah should succeed and they should hold Augusta, — as 
they later did, — since it gave them two bases, not so very re- 
mote from each other. From these, with their available forces 
strengthened " by redeeming the army of the Convention," as 
Burgoyne's captured troops were called, they hoped to make a 
counter movement south of the Ohio. 

The expedition which once more gave them Vincennes, while 
Mcintosh was inauspiciously withdrawing to Fort Pitt, was 
conducted by Hamilton without the approval of Haldimand, 
now commanding at Quebec. That general held that such a 
movement carried the invading force beyond the reach of aid, 
while the government's policy had been to depend upon maraud- 
ing parties. Hamilton hiiuself had suggested this alternative 
course of flying bands early in the conflict, and Germain had 
ordered him, March 26, 1777, to pursue it. In June such 
orders were received at Detroit, accompanied by injunctions to 
restrain the barbarities of the savages. Such precautions were 
necessarily inoperative, and it might have been known they 
would be. 

The responsibility for the use of Indians during the war is 
pretty evenly divided between the combatants. The practice of 
it, however, by the ministerial party meant attacks on women 
and children and the spoliation of homes. The practice of it 
by the Americans gave no such possible misery to an invading 
army, which was without domestic accompaniments. The use of 
the Stockbridge Indians during the investment of Boston doubt- 
less antedated the employment of such allies by the royal com- 
manders. On Gage's reporting to Dartmouth this fact, the 
minister (August 2, 1775) told that general "there was no 
room to hesitate upon the propriety of pursuing the same meas- 
ure." The British government at the same time began the 
shipment (August, 1775) of presents to reward the constancy 
of the Indians. 

It was on September 2, 1776, that Hamilton, writing from 
Detroit to Dartmouth, urged that "every means should be 



HAMILTON AND THE INDIANS. 127 

employed that Providence has put into his Majesty's hands," 
— a sentiment which, later ex^jressed by Lord Suffolk, hrono-ht 
upon him (November, 1777) the scathing- rebuke of Chatliaui. 
Congress did not formally sanction the use of Indians till 
March, 1778, and then it was conditioned on Washington's 
judging it to be " prudent and proper." 

Few if any British officers brought themselves so much under 
severe criticism for inciting savage barbarities as Governor 
Hamilton. lie sang war songs with the braves, he made gifts to 
parties that returned with scalps ; but that he explicitly offered 
rewards as an incentive to taking scalps would be hard to prove, 
though the Council of Virginia, after Hamilton became their 
prisoner, charged him with doing so. His glee at the successful 
outcome of savage raids was not unshared by many in the royal 
service. We have abundant testimony of this in the observa- 
tions of John Leech and others while prisoners \\\ the British 
posts. This gruesome hilarity was far, however, from being- 
universal. Such a cynical Tor}^ as Judge Jones shuddered at 
it. Lieutenant-Governor Abbott, at Detroit, in June, 1778, pro- 
tested against the use of Indians, and urged only the securing 
of their neutrality. De Peyster at Mackinac once addressed a 
band of braves as follows : " I am pleased when I see what you 
call live tneat, because I can speak to it and get information. 
Scalps serve to show you have seen the enemy, but they are 
of no use to me; I cannot speak with them." Even Hamilton 
himself at times grew tender, and on hearing that Ilaldimnnd 
had assumed command at Quebec, he hastened to inform him 
that the Indians " never fail [at his hands] of a gratuity on 
every proof of obedience in sparing the lives of such as are 
incapable of defending themselves." 

In June, 1777, Hamilton notified Carleton of a coming- 
Indian council, and told him that he could assemble a tliousand 
warriors in three weeks, " should your Excellency have occasion 
for their services." Shortly after this, Carleton was relieved 
of all responsibility in the matter, as the conduct of the war 
about the upper lakes had, under orders from England, been 
put entirely in the hands of Hamilton. When this new gov- 
ernor reached Detroit to take conmiand, he at once began the 
enrollment of five hundred militia. 

At Detroit, Hamilton was advantageously situated for an 



128 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

offensive war. A British fleet consisting' of the " Gage," car- 
rying twenty-two guns and swivels, beside various smaller craft, 
— it was less than ten years since the British had launched 
their first keel at Detroit, — had command of the lakes, and 
could keep the post at Deti-oit in communication with De 
Peyster at Mackinac and with the British commander at Ni- 
agara, the other strategic points on these inland waters. Unfor- 
tunately for Hamilton, there was more or less disaffection at 
and around his post, and the health of Clark was a common 
toast even in the press-gang, which he kept at work on the for- 
tifications. The governor was never quite sure that somebody 
was not betraying his plans, nor was he certain that for a quart 
of rum an Indian would not carry tidings to General Hand, 
who was striving to open the road from Pittsburg to Detroit. 
Hamilton's force was perhaps five hundred in all, consisting of 
four companies of the King's Regiment under Lernoult, a single 
company of the 47th, and two companies of Butler's Rangers. 

While Clark had been preparing to descend the Ohio, Hand 
with five hundred men had made (February, 1778) an incursion 
into the Ohio country, but his movement had only that kind of 
success which gave his expedition the bitter designation of the 
" squaw campaign." His purpose was to destroy some stores 
which Hamilton had sent to Cayahoga (Cleveland) as a base 
for a campaign against Fort Pitt, and in this he utterly failed. 

Late in March, Hand was distressed at new developments. 
Alexander McKee, Simon Girty, Matthew Elliot, and others, 
had for some time been exciting suspicion at Fort Pitt, where 
they lingered, and at last they disappeared. There was little 
doubt they had gone over to Hamilton, and would try on 
their way to Detroit to turn the friendly Delawares against 
the Americans. They did this, though Heckewelder, the Mo- 
ravian, was sent on their tracks to prevent it. This emissary 
found that the renegades had passed to the Scioto, and were 
doing further mischief among the Shawnees. It was early 
summer (June) when Girty and his companions reached De- 
troit, and found Hamilton in the midst of councils held with the 
Indians. On July 3, on presenting a battle-axe to a chief, the 
governor said, " I pray the Master of Life to give you success," 
and with svich prayers he was sending out parties to intercept 
the boats ascending the Ohio with supplies for Fort Pitt. 



1 



I 



HAMILTON ALERT. 129 

Thus occupied, Hamilton might well have thought he was on 
the whole the master of the situation, when, on August 1, 1778, 
he received the news of the capture by Clark of Kaskaskia. 
He did not at once comprehend the character of the conquest. 
He supposed that the captors were a party from the flotilla 
commanded by Willing, whom he describes as coming " of one 
of the best families in Philadelphia, but of infamous character 
and debauched morals." He further suspected that the Span- 
iards had as much to do with the incursion as Willing had. 
He looked upon the Wabash tribes now as his main depend- 
ence in resisting further raids, and sent Celoron among them 
with a belt. In a letter which he wrote to Germain he pite- 
ously complains that there was not now a British fort or garri- 
son between the lakes and the Gulf. Haldimand, before he 
could have got intelligence from Hamilton, was already coun- 
seling him to use the tribes of the Wabash, and fill the Ohio 
valley with rangers, so as to keep communication with Stuai't 
and the Cherokees. This plan was the gist of the British 
policy, and Haldimand, as soon as he learned how matters had 
gone with Rocheblave, was urging Hamilton to active endeav- 
ors ; but he never quite apjjroved permanent posts so far remote 
from the lakes. 

As soon as more detailed news reached Hamilton about the 
real actors in the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes, he lost 
no time in planning a recapture. He was still somewhat dis- 
trustful of the French about his post, and felt that all traders 
were rebels at heart, and so he watched them warily. It was 
necessary that Stuart in the south should know his jmrpose, and 
he sent a verbal statement to him by a messenger, who was to 
seek that Indian agent by way of the Chickasaw country. 

Hamilton at this time was dreaming of some large measures. 
He informed Haldimand that the forks of the Ohio should be 
seized and fortified, as well as those of the Mississippi at the 
mouth of the Ohio. The occupation of Vincennes he looked 
upon as but a first step to these plans. On September 28, 
1778, he wrote to Haldimand that " tlie Spaniards are feeble 
and hated by the French ; the French are fickle and have no 
man of capacity to lead them ; the rebels are enterprising and 
brave, but want resources ; and tlie Indians can obtain their 
resources but from the English, if we act without loss of time." 



130 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

It was important to Hamilton's plans that De Pe^^ster, at 
Mackinac, should cooperate with him, and that the rebels should 
not be allowed to obtain a foothold on the lakes in that direc- 
tion. The commander at Detroit had sent oif messages to 
Mackinac on September 16, asking De Peyster to send his 
Indians down the Illinois River by the Chicago portage. 

Arent Schuyler de Peyster, of a New York family, a some- 
what rattle-brained person, given to writing illiterate letters, but 
in some ways an enterprising and prudent commander, had been 
in charge at Mackinac since 1774. There had grown up about 
that post a considerable trade, and a portion of it in the direc- 
tion of the Mississippi employed a fleet of sixty canoes. Lately, 
and in ignorance of Clark's success at Kaskaskia, De Peyster 
had allowed one Charles Gratiot to go down to the Illinois 
country for trade, where he found the rebels ready purchasers 
of his wares. De Peyster learned of the true state of affairs at 
Kaskaskia only a few days before Hamilton had dispatched his 
message to him, and on September 21, 1778, he wrote to Hal- 
dimand : " The rebels are so firmly fixed in Illinois that I fear 
if they are not routed by some means, the whole Mississippi 
trade is knocked up." 

De Peyster, though he had feared an attack at Mackinac, 
met Hamilton's demand by dispatching Langlade and Gautier, 
with a band of Indians, towards St. Joseph, to create a diver- 
sion in Hamilton's favor. Their instructions were dated Octo- 
ber 26. At that time Hamilton, well posted on the doings of 
Clark through an Ottawa chief, had already left Detroit. Be- 
fore he started, he drew up his force on the common, read the 
articles of war, exacted a renewed oath from the French, and 
got Pere Potier, " a man of respectable character and venerable 
figure," to give the Catholics a blessing. 

On October 7, the invading force, consisting of about one 
hundred and seventy-five whites, regulars and volunteers, and 
three hundred and fifty Indians, left Detroit by the river. The 
flotilla, on its passage to the mouth of the Maumee, experienced 
such stormy weather that Hamilton in his anxiety suffered 
" more than can be expressed." That river was then ascended 
to the rapids, and above these obstructions they pushed on in 
boats, lightening them when it was necessary to pass the rifts. 
On October 24, 1778, they reached the nine-mile portage, and 



VINCENNES RETAKEN. 131 

carrying over this, they shot rapidly down the Wabash on a 
freshet which Hamilton had created by cutting the beaver 
dams. 

The force was within three miles of Vincennes when Lieu- 
tenant Helm, still in command at that post, first obtained defi- 
nite tidings of the approach, though he had been distui'bed by 
rumors some days earlier. 

Plelm's men, who had been about seventy in number, began 
to desert under apprehension. We have a letter, which at this 
time he wrote to Clark, and which Hamilton later forwarded. 
In this he says he has only twenty-one men left. He continued 
inditing the letter till the enemy were within three hundred 
yards, and closes it with expressing a doubt if he had four men 
upon whom he could depend. Major Hay, representing Hamil- 
ton, had appeared in the place the day before (December 16), 
giving warning of the danger of resistance to the townspeople. 
On the 17th, Helm was summoned to surrender, and did so, — 
the usual story of his marching out with one man may })erha])S 
be questioned. Two days later, the British oath was admin- 
istered to the residents, numbering not far from six hundred 
souls, of whom a third were capable of bearing arms. The com- 
munity doubtless included at other seasons some hunters and 
traders, who were absent at this time. 

Almost the first act of Hamilton was to dispatch messengers 
to Stuart to propose a meeting of their respective forces in the 
spring on the Cherokee (Tennessee) Kiver, whence, assisted by 
the southern Indians, the united detachments could harry the 
rebel frontiers. Hamilton also notified the Spanish commander 
on the Mississippi that while he and Stuart struck the Alle- 
ghany frontier, a force from Mackinac would sweep the rebels 
out of the Illinois country, and warned him that if he expected 
innnunity from attack, he must not harbor the Americans. 

In this defiant spirit Hamilton began to fortify himself, keep- 
ing only eighty or ninety men with him, beside some French 
volunteers. He sent his militia back to Detroit and scattered 
his Indians. In the spring, he counted on their rejoining him 
with other reinforcements. 

The next year, 1779, opened with both parties anxioiis over 
the situation in the Ohio basin. The British, flanking it at 
Detroit, had by Hamilton's success pushed in a wedge at Viu- 



132 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

cennes. Tlie communications of this latter post were tlirougli 
a friendly country, but its situation was exposed, with such a 
vigilant foe as Clark observing it, Kaskaskia in American 
hands had tolerably secure communications with New Orleans, 
and it was neighboring to Spanish sympathizers. But the 
British enjoyed far greater facilities of relief by the lakes than 
could be given to Clark by the Mississippi. 

Between the Wabash and the Alleghany there was a wide 
extent of country, inhabited in the main by those friendly to the 
British, though a portion of the Delawares still stood by the 
Americans, and there were symptoms of hesitancy on the part 
of the Wyandots. The advanced posts of the revolutionists in 
this direction were at Fort Laurens and at Point Pleasant, 
both in almost chronic alarm from the prowling savages. 

The general suspense was to be broken by a fortunate move- 
ment from Kaskaskia. Clark had for some time been busy in 
gaining over the neighboring tribes, and in sealing his friend- 
ship with the Sjianiards and French. His success in these 
endeavors had not led him to anticipate the daring incursion 
of Hamilton, which released the American hold on Vincennes. 
Clark's confidence in his immunity from danger appears in his 
letters to Governor Henry and to the Virginia delegates in Con- 
gress, whom he had addressed in November, 1778. Henry and 
Jefferson no doubt saw the great importance of sustaining Clark, 
for his success could but tell upon the ultimate negotiations for 
peace, and his continued hold on the Illinois country would 
work a practical annulment of the pretensions of the Quebec 
Bill. The Virginia Assembly proved itself ready to give Clark's 
men such encouragement as would come from a promise of 
bounty lands, and later (November 23) its records bore an entry 
of the formal thanks which they voted to the leader himself. 
To cause him to be unhampered by civic duties, the new county 
of Illinois had been set up. But a belief in the wisdom of this 
western campaign was not universal, and there were those who 
questioned the propriety of Henry's divergence from the single 
pui'pose of protecting the Kentucky and Tennessee settlements. 

Clark, however, was to silence opposition by a brilliant 
stroke. While Hamilton at Vincennes was preparing his plans 
for the s])ring, Clark was devising a sudden move upon the en- 
emy on the Wabash. A corporal and six men, deserting from 



CLARK'S ADVANCE. 133 

Hamilton in January, 1779, had brought Clark the confirma- 
tion of rumors, if not indeed the first news of Helm's surrender. 
Already Hamilton's Indian scouting- parties were hovering about 
Kaskaskia, and one of them, under an Ottawa chief, barely 
missed Clark one day, when he was returning to Kaskaskia 
from Cahokia. But more comprehensive toils were threaten- 
ino- him and the American cause without his knowino- it. 

Hamilton's couriers had already come to a plan with the 
southern Indians for four separate movements. Kaskaskia was 
to be attacked for one. The Shawnees were to be assisted in an 
onslausfht on Fort Laurens for another. A third was to com- 
bine the Wabash Indians in a promiscuous swoop. A fourth 
was to station other savages at the mouth of the Cherokee River 
to intercept any flotilla of supplies and men jaassing either way. 
To these several bands Hamilton was to supply British officers 
and a horde of Ottawas, Hurons, and Chippewas. 

While Clark was brooding on his own projects and Hamilton 
was developing his plans, each in ignorance of the other's con- 
dition, Vigo had left Kaskaskia on December 18, 1778, before 
news of Hamilton's success had reached that place, in order to 
carry supplies to Helm. One of Hamilton's scouting parties 
captured him on the 24:th, and he was carried into Vincennes 
as a prisoner. 

Hamilton suspected that Vigo's professions of trade were a 
cover for other purposes, and kept him under arrest. Father 
Gibault interceded, and Vigo was set free on a promise that 
he would do nothing at Kaskaskia on his waj^ back detri- 
mental to the king's interest. Vigo avoided Kaskaskia, and 
went to St. Louis instead. It was not long before Clark knew 
from a source not difficult to divine that Hamilton had but 
eighty men with him. It was necessary for Clark to move 
quickly, and Vigo's readiness to back the American ci-edit 
helped Clark to get his sup])lies for the march. Vigo liimself 
came to Kaskaskia on January 29, 1779. A gallery, carrying 
small guns and munitions, was dispatched on February 4, under 
the command of John Rogers, down the Mississippi and up the 
Ohio and Wabash to a point ten leagues below Vincennes, 
where it was to await the arrival of Clark with a force which 
was to march overland. The leader, with a band of one hundred 
and seventy — some accounts say two hundred — adventurous 



134 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

spirits, American and French, began a clay or two later his 
painful march of about one hundred and seventy-five miles. 
He had one hundred and twenty miles to go, in an inclement 
season, finding his way in parts through drowned lands, broken 
with ice. There were swollen rivers to cross, now by wading 
and now by ferrying. Supplies grew scant, and it was almost 
impossible to keep powder dry. If there is no exaggeration in 
Clark's narrative, there were times when he despaired of life ; 
but "' the finest stallion there is in the country," come of a New 
Mexican stock, bore the commander through, and his men fol- 
lowed him with dauntless pluck. 

His course was at first northwest, and he probably struck 
the St. Louis trail near the modern town of Salem, following 
a trail which fifty years ago was still visible ; and after this 
his track lay nearly east. On February 23, the weary and 
famished men, kept up by the inspiration of their leader, ap- 
proached the town. The Wabash was flowing by it, through a 
broad three leagues of submerged country, making a picture 
of desolation. Clark sent in a scout to the French inhabitants, 
and his message was kept from the garrison. Lying concealed 
till after dark, and taking as guides five men, whom he had 
captured, he rapidly entered the town. A scouting party, which 
Hamilton had sent out three hours before, fortunately missed 
them. Clark told off a part of his force to occupy the town, 
while a band of riflemen approached the fort, — Sackville, as it 
was called, — and, throwing up some earthworks, established 
themselves within range. During the night, after the moon 
went down, the party which Hamilton had sent out got safely 
in. By daylight the assailants' trenches were near enough to 
annoy the garrison with the dropping fire of their rifles, for 
which the townspeople had made good Clark's damaged powder. 
They had also given the hungry troops the only good meal they 
had had for a week. 

There was pretty soon a passing and repassing of flags, 
Helm, now on parole, bringing Hamilton's messages. Clark 
replied in a note which Haldimand, in sending it later to Clin- 
ton, called " curious for its impertinence of style." In a 
personal interview, the two commanders indulged in mutual 
crimination, and Hamilton was charged with a barbarous 
spirit. Clark was stubborn for an unconditional surrender, 



VINCENNES GARRISONED. 135 

and Hamilton manoeuvred for some modification, but all to no 
purpose. Before the day was gone, the fort was surrendered, 
with nearly eighty officers and men. There had been little 
bloodshed, and Clark had only one man slightly wounded. 

Three days later, on the 27th, the " Willing," as Rogers's 
galley was called, arrived. She had buffeted longer than was 
expected with the strong currents of the Wabash. She added 
forty-eight men to Clark's little army, with some small guns 
and swivels. Very soon Clark sent Helm and a detachment 
up the river, which succeeded in capturing a train, under an 
escort of forty men, which was bringing supplies and dispatches 
for Hamilton. The party returned to Vineennes on February 
27. On March 8, Hamilton and such prisoners as were not 
paroled, accompanied by a guard, were started on their way to 
Virginia. It was a long journey, and at least two thirds of the 
route they made on foot. They reached Richmond in May, 
and brought the first news of Clark's success, his earlier dis- 
patches having been intercepted. Hamilton remained in con- 
finement at Williamsburg till October, 1780, when he was sent 
on parole to New York. Later, on July 6, 1781, he made a 
report to Haldimand, which is our main source for the study of 
these campaigns for the British side. 

Two days after Hamilton had started, Clark wrote (March 
10) to Harrison, the speaker of the Virginia Assembly, tliank- 
ing him for the vote of thanks which that body had passed, 
and expressing his great satisfaction at the prospect of rein- 
forcements. " This stroke will nearly put an end to the Indian 
war," he said, and he expressed the expectation of finishing it 
in two months, if amply supported by a new detachment. '' I 
hope to do somet^iing clever if they arrive," he added, referring 
to his project of a march on Detroit. He did not attempt to 
disguise his purpose in a note which he addressed a few days 
later (jSIarch IG ) to the commander at that post, to which he 
had sent others of his prisoners, who had taken an oath of 
neutrality. " My compliments to the gentlemen of the garri- 
son," he says ; ^ if they are building works, it will save us the 
trouble." 

Clark, in this buoyant mood, leaving in Vineennes a garrison 
of some forty men, under Helm, took seventy or eighty others, 
and on Mai^ch 20 embarked in the " Willing," accompanied by 



136 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

five other armed boats. His purpose was to make ready in Kas- 
kaskia for further movements in the spring. Arrived there, he 
prepared, on April 29, duplicate dispatches to Henry and Jef- 
ferson, describing his campaign, and these have come down to 
us. His earlier letters had been taken, as has been said, from 
his messenger near the Ohio falls, where a party of Hurons 
had waylaid their bearer. 

But movements were already in progress south of the Ohio 
destined to cause disappointment to Clark. Cameron, now 
working in the British interests among the southern Indians, 
supposed that Hamilton was secure in Vincennes. He had 
already planned an inroad of Chickamaugas and other Chero- 
kees on the Carolina border, to distract attention from Hamil- 
ton's contemplated raid over the Ohio. When James Robert- 
son, the pioneer of the Cumberland region, heard of it, he sent 
warnings to the Watauga people. That hardy colony immedi- 
ately sprang to the task which was implied. A considerable 
body of riflemen, under Evan Shelby, were, by April 10, on 
their way down the Clinch. A part of this force was a regi- 
ment which made up the five hundred men intended for Clark 
and his Detroit campaign. Their diversion to a new field was 
never atoned for. 

Shelby's onset was rapid. He destroyed a large deposit of 
corn among the Chickamaugas, which had been gathered for 
Hamilton's intended invasion. He burned the towns of that 
ferocious tribe, and lost not a life amid all his acts of devasta- 
tion. All immediate danger to the Kentucky settlements was 
now at an end. 

During the respite a new immigration set in by the Ohio 
and the Wilderness Road, and to the number of eight or ten 
thousand souls a year, if statements of this kind are not in 
excess of truth. The Virginia surveyors, to help the influx, 
laid out a new road over the Cumberland ^Mountains towards 
" the open country of Kentucky," so as " to giv^e passage to 
packhorses." 

While this success of Shelby checked the southern Indians 
and dashed the hopes which the British had based on their ad- 
vantage in Georgia, there was among the royalists in the north 



HALDIMAND ANXIOUS. 137 

great anxiety lest Clark's prestige and the use of Fort Laurens 
as a base for a new advance from Fort Pitt should together 
put in great hazard their signal position at Detroit. If lost, 
however, the blow would not be irreparable, for the Ottawa 
Kiver route would still afford an easy eonninuiieation with Lake 
Huron and the western tribes. 

De Peyster at Mackinac did not hear of Hamilton's capture 
till about the time of Shelby's raid. Langlade and Gautier 
had just reached Milwaukee, or as some say St. Joseph, when 
the unwelcome tidings scattered their Indians. De Peyster's 
position was an embarrassing one, for his intentions to succor 
Vincennes had been utterly foiled. He felt constrained to pro- 
tect his own post as well as he could, and to animate the Sioux 
against the French, in retaliation for their encouragement of 
the Americans. 

Haldimand, at his remote headcpiai'ters, I'emained for some 
time in dread lest Clark would send a force against Mackinac. 
The British commanding general, in New York, was sending 
word west in Febriiary, 1779, before it was known that Vin- 
cennes was in danger, that one hundred and thirty carpenters 
and two hundred wood-cutters had been sent by the rebels over 
the mountains to open a way, and that every saddler in Phila- 
delphia was hard at work making pack-saddles. We know that 
in May one hundred and fifty l)oat-builders were at work near 
Fort Pitt. 

Lernoult, at Detroit, received word of Hamilton's capture on 
March 26, 1779. An interpreter, having escaped from Vin- 
cennes in the confusion, had carried the tidings. Lernoult felt 
apprehensive, at once, of the safety of the train which Clark had 
captured, and saw how the route by the Maumee was thrown 
open to the Americans. He promptly sent to Haldimand for 
aid. While troops were on the way thither from Nii^gara. and 
before they arrived, Clark, just about being relieved by Todd 
of the civil government, had made up his mind (April 29) that 
his available force was insufficient to advance, and so ex2)ressed 
himself to the governor of Virginia. 

To add to Haldimand's anxiety, he was also uncertain al)()ut 
tlie fate of the Vincennes convoy, and knew how its su])plies 
would aid Clark, if he had captured it. He was also painfully 
conscious how difficult it had become to satisfy the Indians 



138 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

with the supplies and gratuities which Haiuiitou, in his confi- 
dence, had promised them. Farther than this, he was at his 
wits' end to know who among the French, and ahnost nnder his 
hand, was corresponding with the rebels, for a letter of Lafay- 
ette and D'Estaing's proclamation to his countrymen, which had 
been issued at Boston, October 28, 1778, were insidiously cir- 
culating among them, creating not a little responsive excitement, 
not only among the old Canadians, but among the Indians. If 
this sympathy should invite raids from over the border, Haldi- 
mand had scarce a thousand men to guard a nuiltitude of 
points, and of these he had learned to place small confidence 
upon the German regiments. 

Sending his aid, Captain Brehm (May 25), to Detroit to 
insure better information in that direction, tidings after a 
while reached Haldimand from the Scioto and Muskingum 
valleys, which showed that the war was again starting with the 
spring. 

Colonel John Bowman, in May, had crossed the Ohio near 
the mouth of the Licking, with nearly three hundred Kentucky 
volunteers. He made a sudden dash upon a Shawnee town 
near the modern Chillicothe. Having burned the houses and 
secured some plunder, he returned. He had dealt a blow which 
disinclined the savages of the north to follow English leaders 
in a projected movement into Kentucky. So another concerted 
movement of the British was checked, for Cornwallis, after 
Lincoln's surrender at Charleston (May 12), had counted on 
sending a band of Tories to lead the aroused Creeks and Chero- 
kees upon the frontiers of Tennessee, while the northern In- 
dians came down on the other side. 

Meanwhile, the American plans on the upper Ohio were not 
more successful. All through the spring of 1779, scalping 
parties of AVyandots and Mingoes had been prowling about the 
exposed fort on the Tuscarawas, and ambushing convoys from 
Fort Pitt. Twice in the winter the savages attacked the fort, 
and Gibson being warned by Zeisberger, the enemy were forced 
to retire through the stubbornness of the almost starved garri- 
son, for Mcintosh had failed to get in supplies by way of the 
Muskingum. The most strenuous effort of the enemy had been 
made in February, 1779, after Girty had intercepted some of 



SULLIVAN'S CAMPAIGN. 139 

Gibson's letters. Captain Bird, of the King's Regiment, accom- 
panied by Simon Girty and a few soldiers, now led a horde 
of savages. Starting np from a concealment near by, they 
surprised a party which Gibson had sent out, and gave the 
first notice of an investment of the fort. For nearly a month 
the blockade continued, and a few days after the enemy disap- 
jieared, Mcintosh arrived with relief, and found the garrison 
living on rawhides and roots. On the general's return to Fort 
Pitt, he was soon relieved of the command of the department by 
his second in command, Colonel Brodhead, whom Washington 
had selected on March 5, 1779. The new commander assumed 
charge of the department with small confidence in the condi- 
tions which Mcintosh's course had imposed, and with still less 
content with the huckstering element about Fort Pitt. " The 
cursed spirit of monopoly is too prevalent," he wrote (May 26), 
"and greatly injures the soldiers." At the end of May, he 
heard that Fort Laurens was again threatened, and was to be 
attacked " when the strawberries are ripe." He succeeded at 
once in throwing . supplies into that fort, now garrisoned by a 
body of seventy-five men, though the country which the convoy 
traversed was swarming with Indians. But in August it was 
thought prudent to abandon the post. 

The position of all the other forts in the department had 
been for some time precarious. In June, Fort Randoli^h at the 
mouth of the Kanawha was abandoned, leaving Fort Henry at 
Wheeling the most advanced post, while an inner line of stock- 
ades from Fort Ligonier to the new Fort Armstrong at Kittan- 
ning (built in June) were the chief protections of the frontier. 

While the region north of the Ohio was thus abandoned, 
Shelby's rapid movements had quieted, for the most part, that 
south of the Ohio, and encouraged some adventurous frontiers- 
men to cross the river and seek lands among the Delawares, 
relying upon their friendship. Brodhead had little confidence 
in that inccingruous people, and did what he could to prevent 
the risks. 

In August, 1779, General Sullivan was well started on his 
exasperating inroad among the Iroquois lakes of New York, 
partly to punish the Indians for their treachery, and partly to 
render more open the communication with the West. His 



140 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

devastation was ample, but its effect was not lasting. Some 
portions of the Six Nations were beyond his reach. Such were 
some of the Senecas and Munseys, whose lands stretched into 
the northwestern parts of the present State of Ohio. To make 
a diversion in Sullivan's favor, and similarly to chastise this 
portion of that people, Brodhead, by calling- in his outposts 
and summoning volunteers from the county lieutenants, suc- 
ceeded in gathering about six hundred men near Fort Pitt. 
The response for volunteers had not been as general as he 
had wished, and he gave as a reason that the people are " intent 
upon going to Kentuck ; " but he succeeded in getting some, 
who, in the guise of Indians, were content to scour the country 
for scalps. 

Brodhead had been anxious to start on this expedition so as 
to get some advantage out of two hundred of his men, whose 
term of service expired on August 10 ; but it was not until the 
11th that he set out, and in such spirits that he hoped he would 
be allowed, after punishing the Senecas, to march on Detroit. 
He marched up the Alleghany, and set to work burning houses, 
and destroying cornfields, and gathering plunder, later to be 
sold for the benefit of his men. He had lost neither man nor 
beast when, on September 11, he was back in Fort Pitt, having 
temporarily, at least, quelled the savage temper in this region. 

In October, he sent a force to drive off trespassers who had 
left the Monongahela and had crossed the Ohio, while he tried 
to persuade the Delawares not to molest any who escaped his 
vigilance. 

He was still dreaming of an attack on Detroit, and in Novem- 
ber he asked Washington's permission to make it before Feb- 
ruary, when the floods would interfere. He was advised by 
Washington to wait till spring, and gather supplies and infor- 
mation in the interim. It was discouraging when Brodhead 
heard of the death of David Rogers and the capture of the 
supplies which he was bringing up the river from New Orleans. 
If the reports which reached Fort Pitt were true, — and Brod- 
head had asked Zeisberger to get him information, — the garri- 
son at Detroit counted but about six hundred, regulars and 
militia. 

While thus neither Mcintosh nor Brodhead had accomplished 



GENERAL SUSPENSE. 141 

mueh, there had been in Jeft'erson "and othex's a hirger confi- 
dence in the daring backwoods spirit of Chirk. By July 1, 
1779, Clark had returned to Vincennes, only to be disappointed 
in meeting there but one hundred and fifty of the recruits 
whom he had expected from Virginia, and but thirty of the 
three hundred Kentuckians who had been promised to him. 
AVith an inadequate force, he was not tempted to carry out 
" the clever thing " which he had set his heart upon, and so, in 
August, leaving Helm at Vincennes, he returned to the falls of 
the Ohio. Here he again raised the question of an attack on 
Detroit ; but it was the opinion of his council of war that at 
least a thousand men were necessary for such a stroke, while 
with half that number he could successfully hold his own. 
To do this, it was thought, required a force of two hundred at 
the mouth of the Ohio, and a hundred and fifty each at Vin- 
cennes and Cahokia. 

Clark's i^osition at the falls, where his men had been prom- 
ised one himdred and fifty thousand acres in bounty land, alarmed 
De Peyster during the winter, lest Clark should fortify so good 
a strategic point. It was Clark's purpose to spend the time till 
spring in an incursion among the Shawnees on the Miami and 
Scioto; but the river fell and rendei"ed transportation difficult, 
and the ])lan was abandoned. On November 19, he wrote a 
letter to George Mason, which, with his letters of February 24 
from Vincennes, and April 29 from Kaskaskia, constitutes the 
main sources for the study of his campaigns. Clark's memoirs, 
said to have been written at the request of Jefferson and INIadi- 
son, though more in detail, were written (1791) too long after- 
wards to be of comparable value. 

So the year (1779) was closing almost every where beyond the 
mountains with suspense on both sides, but with the opposing 
generals intent on preparations for a new eamj^aign in the 
spring. 

In August, 1779, Ilaldimand had sent some aid to Detroit, 
and had taken measure to reassure the Six Nations, whose si)ir- 
its had been rudely shattered by Sullivan and Brodhead. It 
seemed doubtful if Clinton could keep his promise of large rein- 
forcements for Canada, for by September the negotiations for 
exchanging the Convention troops which surrendered at Sara- 



142 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK. 

toga bad fallen tlirough, and Soutli Carolina, where the British 
were strengthening their foothold, had made large demands 
on the resources at headquarters in New York. So Detroit, 
though a new fort had been built there, was far from secure 
when, late in the year, De Peyster came from Mackinac to take 
charge. 

That commander had left the garrison at the straits hardly 
more confident. The effect of Hamilton's discomfiture, when 
news of it had reached them in May, had been discouraging. 
It rendered the French uneasy, and, as De Peyster said, " cowed 
the Indians in general." Haldimand, when he heard of these 
results, asked De Peyster to send some Puants, Sacs, and Foxes 
down to Quebec to give them new courage at the sight of a 
British fleet, and later he sent a speech, for De Peyster to 
render to the tribes, in which he advised them " to keep the 
Bostonians [Americans] out of the country in order to enjoy 
peace and plenty." 

De Peyster had by this time asked to be relieved, and Sin- 
clair was sent to take the post, which in his superior's judg- 
ment was "in a critical situation." Not long before, a French 
trader, Godefroy Linctot, had deserted to the rebel cause, and 
in July, 1779, it had been believed at Mackinac that the rene- 
gade was preparing to attack St. Joseph with four hundred 
men. After this the Indians were slowly rehabilitated in the 
English interest, and before De Peyster left he had himself 
begun to be hopeful that " the Indians would clear the Illinois 
at one stroke," and welcome the Cherokees coming up from the 
south. Haldimand hardly shared De Peyster's confidence, and 
when Sinclair arrived in October, 1779, he found it not so easy 
to arouse the Indians for a spring campaign to the Illinois. 
Sinclair had been sent there with a distinct plan of campaign on 
the part of the home government. He was expected to descend 
the Mississippi, while Campbell from Pensacola took New Or- 
leans and came up to meet him. Germain in the previous June 
had notified Haldimand of this plan, and at a later date he had 
instructed Stuart to keep the southern Indians in open (commu- 
nication with Detroit. Germain's purpose had already been, 
temporarily at least, dashed by Galvez's prompt movement in 
September, 1779, on Natchez, later to be explained, and by all 
efforts at the north failino-. 



THE CUMBERLAND REGION. 143 

Before the year (1779) closed, a new movement in the west- 
ern regions had been consnmmated, wiiich gave the pioneers a 
firm hokl on the Cumberland valley. During a season which 
was the severest the frontiersmen had experienced, and which 
was marked by suffering and famine throughout the west, James 
Kobertson, now closing a ten years' residence on the Holston, 
had spent the previous year among the Cherokees, laboring 
to keep them quiet. About November 1, 1779, with a train of 
immigrants from the Watauga hamlets, he started west. By 
the close of the year they had built a fort and a few cabins, 
which were the beginnings of the later Nashville. It was a 
region then known as the French Lick, and had been, since 
1714, occasionally occupied by the French hunters. Vast herds 
of buffalo had long found the lick an attraction. Within the 
next three months Robertson's party built a stockade, and scat- 
tered their huts about the ground. 

This occupation of a new region was the most decided gain 
for the American cause which a year of anxiety had developed. 
Clark still held the Illinois country, to be sure, but he was 
surrounded with little of that domesticity which comforted Rob- 
ertson at the French Lick. With little homogeneousness in 
the Illinois population, there was scant confidence in its future. 
Now and for some time yet, Clark's ability to maintain himself 
depended on the pecuniary aid which Vigo and Pollock ren- 
dered. In November (1779), the Virginia Assembly had de- 
cided to strengthen Clark's position, but their action was wholly 
dependent on the credit which the governor of that State could 
obtain at New Orleans. For three and a half years fi'om 
March, 1778, Clark dispensed fifty thousand dollars in specie, 
or nearly two and a quarter millions in currency. Up to the 
close of 1779, he drew in nearly equal parts fifty thousand dol- 
lars or more in specie from Pollock and from the Virginia 
treasury. Pollock's account with Virginia, mainly for the sup- 
port of Clark, shows that he advanced in specie down to Au- 
gust, 1781, over ninety thousand dollars. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

1774-1779. 

Louis XV. of France had died in 1774, and in the mid- 
summer of that year, Maurepas, affable and courtly, but ^Yhat- 
ever you jjlease in principle and a known enemy of England, 
had been put at the head of the cabinet of the new king-, Louis 
XVI. The minister of foreign affairs w^as Vei-genues, now a 
man of fifty-three, a patient and polite diplomat of the intrigu- 
ing school. He was perfectly unscrupulous when occasion re- 
quired, and an adept in the arts of deceit. " A little good- 
natured wisdom," said Jay at a later day, " often does more in 
politics than nuieh slippery craft. By the former, the French 
acquired the esteem and gratitude of America, and by the 
latter their minister is impairing it." It was his policy to be 
prepared for war, and to watch for an opjDortunity to catch 
England at a disadvantage. 

He must have looked on with some satisfaction when he saw 
his Anglican rival strive, by the Quebec Bill, to hem in her 
revolting colonies by the same geographical confines which 
France in claiming to the AUeghanies had so long struggled to 
maintain. A few years later, as we shall see, Vergennes him- 
self would gladly have pressed the same restraint upon the nas- 
cent American Republic, if Franklin, Adams, and Jay had given 
him the opportunity. Already the alliance which was to follow 
the downfall of Burgoyne was a purpose of Vergennes, but 
he could not at this juncture escape anxiety lest the concil- 
iatory counsels of Chatham would prevail, and lest England, by 
plunging into a French war, would, as her cabinet dared to 
hope, succeed in winning back the loyalt}^ of her colonies. He 
was, indeed, astounded at the imbecility of the English ministry 
in neglecting opportunities of appeasing the rebels. He was 
told that the obstinacy of the king was at fault. The monarch 



VERGENNES. 145 

might indeed be stubborn, but the real fault was the blindness 
of the Tory party to the change which was taking place in what 
that age called the prerogative of the king, and in the principles 
of the British Constitution. There w:as an unwillinaness to 
recognize the fact that revolutions are no respecters of vested 
political interests. The Tories failed to understand that civic 
progress is often made on the wreck of the present. 

Vergennes was possessed by a similar obtuseness. Still, an 
occasional light was thrown into his mind by his consuming- 
desire to humble England. Egregiously perfidious himself, he 
was continually prating of English perfidy. 

Congratulating himself, somewhat prematurely, that Spain 
was won to his views, Vergennes, on August 7, 1775, in a 
communication addressed to the Spanish minister, distinctly 
foreshadowed his purpose of active intervention in the Amer- 
ican war. In October, M. Bonvouloir sailed in the " Charm- 
ing Betsy " for Philadelphia, under secret instructions from 
Vergennes, to observe what was going on in the American 
Congress. He was also to seek occasions to let the Americans 
know of the sympathy of France. 

Doniol's bulky acknowledgment of French heartlessness, as 
his great work has proved to be, as well as Stevens's Facsimiles, 
show us how detestably insincere Vergennes could be. Near 
the end of 1775, he put on record his opinions for the edifica- 
tion of his king. He told his royal master that French aid 
alone could make sure the success of the colonies. He assured 
him that it was the true policy of France to cripple her natural 
enemy. AVhen the struggle in America had weakened Eng- 
land, the time, he said, would come publicly to assist the revolt. 
jNIeanwhile, he explained, France must keep the American 
courage up, by promises, till such a propitious turn of the con- 
test comes. 

The American Congress was at the same time playing into 
Vergennes's hands. Late in November, they had instituted a 
Committee of Secret Correspondence, with Franklin at its 
head, and on December 12 this committee instructed Arthur 
Lee, then in Loudon, to make approaches to the Continental 
powers. 

When the new year (177G) opened, Vergennes found himself, 
through the intrigues of his enemies, in a degree of embarrass- 



146 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

ment which was increased by the indecision of the king. Be- 
fore January was gone, a letter from Beauniarchais, saying that 
England was nearly hopeless, was so skillfully used in Ver- 
gennes's hands that the king withdrew his opposition, and the 
way seemed clear. 

Still, the influence of Maurepas and Turgot was against pre- 
cipitating a war, which, in the latter's judgment, might, by 
emancipating the British colonies, give the signal for the revolt 
of all colonies of whatever power. Turgot was indeed in a 
fair way to prove too much of an obstacle, and in May he was 
dismissed. 

Early in March, encouraging reports came from Bonvouloir, 
and Gerard de Rayneval formulated the results for Vergennes's 
eye. It was represented that if the humiliation of England 
was carried to an extent of assuring the independence of the 
colonies, France could have no fear of them in their exhaustion. 
War with England was represented as inevitable, whatever the 
result of their assisting the colonies. 

Vergennes had no disposition to retreat, and on May 2, 1776, 
he definitely requested the king to approve a grant of money to 
the colonies, and the royal assent was given. Up to this time 
the minister had abstained from positive action in aid of the 
colonies ; but he had winked at the help which was being given 
in the French ports. It was a turning-point, and a policy was 
begun of decided significance. 

Tlie troops which England had already disjjatched to America 
alarmed Vergennes, lest a way be found in the sequel to hurl 
them against the French West Indies. At the same time, he 
aroused Spain by picturing a like danger, if these troops should 
be moved against New Orleans. The ministers at Madrid 
were not slow to see how Louisiana could aggrandize Spain, if 
England, in the first instance, and, after that, if her severed de- 
pendencies, could be kept back from the Mississippi. Nothing 
could conduce so much to this end as the exhaustion of both 
parties in the war, and the greater the exhaustion, the better 
prospects for France and Spain. It was thus, with Spanish 
connivance, the hope of Vergennes to lure the Americans to a 
collapse by giving them hope that they could obtain a subsidy 
of money. On May 3, 1776, Vergennes proposed to Spain 
that she should advance a million dollars to the Americans. 



FRANCE AND SPAIN. 147 

Grimaldi, in advising his royal master to accede to the propo- 
sition and sharing Vergennes's sinister aims, congratulated him 
on a movement which might .not only force England to destruc- 
tion, but would at the same time exhaust the Americans. The 
colonists would in this way become in the end an easy prey to 
the Bourbons. 

Meanwhile, the American Congress, ignorant of the con- 
cealed purposes of France, had sent Silas Deane to Paris as its 
agent. The Committee of Secret Correspondence had given 
him, on March 3, his instructions. Deane soon found himself 
the sport of two parties in the gay cajoital. On the one side 
he was shadowed by a complacent American named Bancroft, 
who reported everything to the English ministry. On the other, 
Vergennes, with whom Deane had his first meeting in July, 
(1776), played the sympathizing friend to conceal his inimical 
wiles. With diplomatic blandness the French minister prom- 
ised all that America could need. 

Not long afterwards came tidings of the Declaration of In- 
dependence. Vergennes was now aroused, and active inter- 
ference seemed imminent, while Beaumarchais had attained a 
position where he could assure the American Committee of 
Secret Corresi^ondence that his fictitious house of Hortales et 
Cie was ready to be an intermediary in bringing Congress 
and the French government into closer relations. Still later, 
(August, 1776), Vergennes, while urging his royal master that 
the time for action had come, also suggested to Spain that she 
could now throw off the mask. Spain hesitated, as Portuguese 
affairs perplexed her, but on October 8, she assented. Almost 
at the same time, news reached Paris of Washington's defeat 
on Long Island, and that untoward event called a halt in the 
autumn of 1776. 

Meanwhile, events were moving rapidly in America, and 
Spanish officials were winking at aid given the colonies at New 
Orleans. 

Intelligence of the action on July 4, 1776, at l^hiladelphia, 
had hardly reached Fort Pitt when, under orders of Congress, 
and by direction of the State of Virginia, Captain George 
Gibson and Lieutenant Linn started, on July 19, down the 
river in the disguise of traders. When, in August, they arrived 



148 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

at New Orleans, they found the Spanish governor, Uuzaga, in 
no complacent mood. He had been uneasy under the suspicion 
that in diplomatic ways all was not going" well. He was appre- 
hensive that England would succeed in pacifying her colonies, 
and could then, with their aid, turn upon Louisiana. To get 
information, he had already sent a spy to Philadelphia. 

Gibson and his companion found, however, prompt sympathy 
in Oliver Pollock. This American had begun active exertions 
in behalf of his countrymen in April, 1776, when he had unsuc- 
cessfully tried to persuade Unzaga to protect American vessels 
against British warships. With Pollock's aid Gibson's acts 
were partly concealed from the British spies, and he bought 
twelve hundred pomids of powder. A part of it, under Pol- 
lock's direction, was shipped north by sea, while the greater 
bulk of it, nine thousand pounds, in one hundred and fifty kegs, 
was placed on barges to ascend the river. This was done while 
English spies were watching for some overt act, and, to make 
it appear that he was committing some offense against Spanish 
law, Gibson allowed himself to be thrown into prison. 

Linn, in charge of the barges, started homeward on Septem- 
ber 22, 1776. It was a long pull against the current for nearly 
eight months, and it was May 2, 1777, before the lieutenant 
delivered his dangerous burden to Colonel William Crawford, 
at Wheeling, " for the use of the Continent." The expedition, 
in its slow progress, had run great risks of being intercepted. 

After Linn had started north, Pollock wrote from New Or- 
leans to Congress, tendering renewed services and recounting 
the beneficial effect which the Declaration of Independence had 
made in that town. He said that the governor was ready to ! 
open trade with the Americans, and would protect their cruisers 
and prizes, should they come into the river. He also added 
that this Spanish official was ready to unite Avitli Congress in 
maintaining a regular express by the Mississippi and Fort 
Pitt, between Philadelphia and New Orleans. Pollock's sym- 
pathies had not escaped the notice of the English spies. His 
surrender was demanded by the British commander at Pensa- 
cola, but was refused. An English sloo])-of-war was lying down 
the river, and Pollock was fearful that some untoward accident i 
might throw him into its commander's hands. Accordingly j 
he desired Congress to give him a commission in some capacity, 



GALVEZ AND POLLOCK. 149 

so that he could have its protection in an emergency. In the 
same letter Pollock adds that the Spanish governor had sent 
orders to the mouth of the river to put American vessels enter- 
ing the passes under the Spanish flag. 

On the 1st of February preceding (1777), Don Bernardo 
de Galvez, the commander of a regiment in the garrison at 
New Orleans, succeeded to the governor's chair. He very soon 
opened communication through Major Cruz, at St. Louis, with 
Colonel Morgan on the Ohio, and took Pollock into his confi- 
dence as one whom Unzaga assured him he could trust. 

Galvez was a young man of twenty-one, of powerful family 
connection, and likely to bring Spanish and French interests 
into close relations. Jay, who later knew his relatives in Spain, 
informed the president of Congress that " the one on the JNIis- 
sissippi has written favorably of the Americans to his brothers 
here, and it would be well to cultivate this disposition.'' The 
op])ortunity to do so was not lost. 

The new governor soon strengthened himself by bringing 
emigrants from the French West Indies. In retaliation for 
British captures on the lakes back of New Orleans, he boldly 
seized some English vessels trading between the Balize and 
Manchac. He began to build some boats to carry long-range 
guns, which would be more than a match for the light guns 
which any v^essel could take over the bar at the mouth of the 
Mississippi. 

Pollock soon devised some audacious plans. In April, 1777, 
he sent a vessel north under Lemire to inform Congress that 
Galvez stood ready to furnish cash and supplies to any American 
force intending to capture Pensacola, and a little later (May 5) 
he urged Congress to make a decision, and, if favorable, to send 
blank commissions to be used in raising troops in New Orleans. 
Colonel George (Gordon, 'commanding at Fort Pitt, had fore- 
stalled any action of Congress, and before Linn's return he had 
sent word to Galvez that if the Spaniards woidd supply trans- 
ports, he was hoping to send one thousand men down the river 
prepared to attack Mobile and Pensacola. A little later, the 
Spanish governor was assured that he need have no apprehen- 
sion, but that the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws coidd be 
depended upon to stand neutral. Nothing came of the project, 
but the Committee of Secret Correspondence took on their part 



150 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

an important step when they a})pointed, in June, 1777, Pollock 
their commercial agent, and directed him to ship at once forty 
or fifty thousand dollars' worth of cloths and strouds to Phila- 
delphia by three or four swift vessels, promising to send flour 
in return to balance the account. 

It was not long before the British blockade of the Atlantic 
coast had become so close that Congress found it impossible to 
send the flour out of port. In October, Pollock was told to run 
the necessary risks of forwarding supplies along the coast, as 
transportation by the river was too slow and, because of Indian 
forays, too hazardous for their present exigencies. 

On September 26, 177G, a few days after Linn's barges had 
cast off their moorings at New Orleans, Congress had appointed 
some commissioners to Europe. At their head was Franklin, 
and he was not without hope that in the final settlement he 
could induce the British ministers to sell Florida and Quebec 
to the new Republic. His companions in the mission were to 
be Arthur Lee, now in London (for Jefferson had declined to 
be one), and Deaue, already in Paris. The latter, active in 
mind, had conceived a new plan for relieving the stagnation of 
events, and on December 1, before Franklin arrived, he had 
written home, outlining a scheme to attract immigration, and 
to find money for the depleted treasury of the colonies. He 
thought that the country which the Quebec Act had aimed to 
alienate from the colonies would be " a resource amply ade- 
quate, under proper regulations, for defraying the whole ex- 
pense of the war, and for providing the sums necessary to pur- 
chase the native right to the soil." To give this land its value 
he proposed that it sliould be made a distinct State, of twenty- 
five million acres, to be confederated with those other colonies 
which had made a declaration of independence. The settling 
of it was to be left to one hundred or more grantees, while 
Congress reserved for their own advantage one fifth of the land, 
mines, etc. To induce immigration, he relied upon the sym- 
pathy with the American struggle which, desj)ite the calcu- 
lating selfishness of the Vergennes ministry, was marked among 
the French people. Before the month (December) closed, the 
American commissioners, Franklin being now on the sjiot, 
had their initial meetino- both with Vergennes and the Count 



FLORIDA BLANC A. 151 

d'Aranda. They got some encouragement in the promise that 
American privateers should have equal protection in the French 
and Spanish ports. Vergennes, however, had lost some of his 
boldness, or was veiling it, when, a few weeks later (February, 
1777) Grimaldi was succeeded at Madrid by the Count Florida 
Blanea. 

This man, who thus became the Spanish king's prime minis- 
ter, was forty-six years old ; he had risen from an inconspicuous 
station, and by force of character had well crowded with action 
his mature life. He disliked England, was jealous of France, 
and hated revolutions. He certainly was not quite ready to 
make good all the promises which Grimaldi had made. He 
had his eye on Portugal, and he wished rather to have French 
aid in securing that little kingdom, than to join in the struggle 
in British America. He thought, also, that France and Spain 
could work together better in Brazil, a Portuguese dependency, 
than in North America. Vergennes felt otherwise, and this 
lack of accord, as well as the bad news from Washington's 
army, seemed at present to be fatal to an agreement. 

To offset the ill effects of the military miscarriages near New 
York, Congress was quite prepared (December, 177G) to prom- 
ise its assistance in capturing Pensacola from the British and 
share its advantages as a port, as well as the navigation of the 
Mississi])pi, with Spain ; but this willingness was not known 
till April, when Franklin opened the question with Aranda. 
A few weeks before (March 4, 1777), Arthur Lee had met Gri- 
maldi at Burgos, but he could get no promise of active assist- 
ance. He farther learned that Florida Blanea was apologizing 
to England and playing shy with Vergennes. Nevertheless, it 
was intimated that the Americans would find powder and other 
supplies at New Orleans, which they could take, if they liked, 
on (a-edit. 

In France there was an active public ojiinion, asking for ac- 
tion, largely induced by the influence of Fi-anklin. But Ver- 
gennes repelled the request of the American connnissioiun-s for 
guns and ships, and made a show of preventing Lafayette and 
De Kalb embarking for America. By April 20, however, La- 
fayette, who had fled to S]>anish territory, \mt to sea, though 
ostensibly for the West Indies. 

This exodus, or some other incident, had aroused Stormont, 



152 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

the British ambassador in Paris, to a belief that an expedition 
to aid the rebels was arranged by a French general officer, and 
he suspected that he could get more particular information if he 
could pay fifteen hundred guineas for it. His government was 
not quite as credulous, and directed him not to pay the money. 
Before long the French cabinet was assuring the London states- 
men of their determined neutrality. This led the British min- 
istry in July to propose a treaty, in which both England and 
France should guarantee their respective possessions in America. 
Vergennes was not to be caught, and before many days had 
passed, he and the king were pretty well agreed that the ex- 
pected crisis for determinate action had come. There was some 
difficulty in making the king see wisdom in abetting a rebellion 
against a royal brother : but Vergennes had little sympathy with 
any such sentiments, when the purpose to punish England was 
in the balance. It had come to be simply a question of the 
opportune moment for a public declaration. Franklin, in Sep- 
tember, was assuring Congress that the commissioners were 
much too far from accomplishing their object. The final fruition 
of all his hopes was nearer than Franklin could have judged. 
The autumn had brought mingled elation and regret in the 
colonies. Washington had failed at Brandywine and German- 
town ; but Burgoyne had capitulated at Saratoga. An army 
worsted was no offset to an army captured, and Jonathan Aus- 
tin Loring, when he sailed, on October 30, as the messenger of 
good tidings to the American commissioners in Paris, carried 
also conviction to the hesitating cabinet of France. 

Early in December, 1777, and not many hours apart, the 
startling news reached Lord North in London, just as he had 
returned at midnight from a debate in Parliament, and it was 
broken to Franklin at Passy by the Boston messenger. It was 
soon heard by Vergennes. " There must be no time lost," he 
said. He let the king, who was wondering what Spain would 
do, understand that an advantage was likely to accrue to whom- 
ever first welcomed the Americans to the company of nations. 

Beaumarchais, when he was trying to induce the French 
king to advance the Americans a million, told him that " to 
sacrifice one million to make England spend a hundred is but 
advancing a million to obtain nine and ninety." The present 
news was a stronger plea than any argument of his could be, 



BURGOYNE'S SURRENDER. 153 

and having- received it from London, he had hopes of being- the 
first to break it in Paris. He was hurrying- to that capital 
as fast as his horses couhl gallop, when his carriage over- 
turned, and he was put to bed in agony in a neighboring liouse. 
It was December 6, and he sent a message ahead, dictated from 
a couch of pain. It was too late. The king- was already en- 
gaged in inviting- propositions from Franklin. Two days later 
(December 8), the American commissioners, in language that 
had probably been arranged with Vergennes, made their re- 
sponse in a document which was at once dispatched to Spain. 
It had no immediate effect. Spain's Mexican and Brazilian 
fleets, with their treasure, were still awaited, and it was not pru- 
dent to incite England to their capture. Beside, Spain's rup- 
ture with Portugal was still unhealed. At least, such were the 
professions. 

Vergennes, meanwhile, was having conference with the 
American commissioners, and on December 17 they were in- 
formed that France was ready for an alliance and would make 
an acknowledgment of their independence. Ten days later 
(December 27), Vergennes was sending word to Madrid that 
Spain was losing- the opportunity of centuries to cripple the 
power of England, and recover Gibraltar, Minorca, and Florida. 
France had already pledged her power to the extent, in one way 
and another, of about three million livres, as Vergennes and 
Franklin both knew. 

The new year (1778) opened in France with the American 
commissioners greatly satisfied with the outlook. " Ever since 
Burgoyne's fate was known," wrote William Lee, " we are 
smiled at and caressed everywhere." Louis XVI., following up 
the arguments of his minister, was sending- word to his Bour- 
bon brother of Spain that he had come to an understanding 
with the American commissioners, " to i)revent the reunion of 
America with England."' Every obstacle removed, on Febru- 
ary G, 1778, the treaty was signed. Stormont, the Englisli 
ambassador in Pai'is, divined what was in progress, and a cer- 
tain " Mr. Edwards " was probing the secrets for hiiu, — per- 
haps, under a new guise, the same Dr. Edward Bancroft who 
had been dogging the steps of Deane. Stormont M'as paying- 
well for what inf(n-mation he secured, and was naturally im- 
mersed in the misery of not knowing just how much to believe 



154 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

of all that was betrayed to him, while, as the negotiations pro- 
ceeded, Maurepas, in his intercourse with him, was blandness 
itself in his denials. Within two days, it was confidently be- 
lieved in London that the French king had at last succumbed, 
and had banished his qualms of conscience in recognizing 
rebels. It was supposed that the allied parties had agreed to 
give Canada and tlie West Indies to France, if the fortunes of 
war threw those regions into their hands. 

On March 10, 1778, Vergennes instructed Noailles in London 
to break the news to Lord Weymouth, and on the 13th it was 
done. The respective ambassadors of the two countries were 
withdi-awn, and when Stormont reached London on the 27th, 
he found bank stocks at 69, a drop to less than a moiety of the 
value of two and a half years before. 

This condition to a mercantile people was veiy alarming. 
Grenville Sharp and others were already outspoken for an 
accommodation with America on the basis of her independence. 
It would prevent, they claimed, a rupture with France and 
Spain. North had inclined to the same view ; but it was not 
a gratefid one to the king and the rest of the cabinet. They 
so far felt the pressure, however, as to introduce into Parlia- 
ment (February 17) acts of conciliation with America on the 
ground of continued allegiance. They were passed, and reached 
America by the middle of April. 

France, fearful of their effect, was soon reassui'ed by a 
prompt rejection of them by Congress. The movement of the 
English ministry encouraged Florida Blanca to offer mediation 
for the purpose of curbing the ambition both of the colonies and 
of England, and of assuring some territorial aggrandizement to 
Spain. It was Spain's proposition to confine the revolted colo- 
nies to the Alleghany slope, while she guaranteed to England 
the valley of the St. Lawrence and the region north of the Ohio, 
taking to herself all south of the Ohio between the mountains 
and the Mississi])pi. England was not so much in straits that 
she could come to such an agreement, and the arbitration was 
refused. 

Spain got nothing for her pains, and France was content, 
both with the failure of Lord North, and with the disapi)oint- 
ment of Florida Blanca. It all looked well in the mind of Ver- 
gennes for securing deeper revenge upon England. Vergennes 



ALLIANCE WITH FRANCE. 155 

cared nothing" for America, if only her exhaustion was increased 
so that France could the better become the arbiter of her future. 
His simple purpose was to degrade England first, and America 
next. 

The defeat of Florida Blanca's plot with England was felt- 
by Vergennes to open the way to secure the alliance of Spain, 
and it was well known what Spain wanted. " The Court of 
Spain," wrote Lee to Congress, March 19, 1778, " will make 
some difficulties about settling the dividing line between their 
possessions and those of the United States. They wish to have 
the cession of Pensacola." Ten days later (March 29), Ver- 
gennes wrote to Gerard at Philadelphia that Spain would 
probably require a promise of Florida before she would accede 
to the alliance, and Gerard was instructed to prepare Congress 
for yielding that point. To insure the continuance of the alli- 
ance with France, Gerard was reminded that the United States 
should be made to understand that Canada must remain to 
England, France renouncing any purpose of regaining that 
province. 

AVhen Congress, on May 4, 1778, had ratified the treaty, at- 
tention had already been directed to the Spanish problem on the ^ , , ;v ^ 
Gulf. Patrick Henry, as governor of Virginia, had as eaxlji^ll 
as October, 1777, been urging upon the Spanish authorities at 
New Orleans the opening of trade with the States by the Missis- 
si]ipi, and now again in January, 1778, he was making a dis- 
tinct proposition to Galvez to accept produce sent down from 
Kentucky in return for munitions and cash. In the following 
June, Colonel David Rogers started from Fort Pitt, in two 
boats built by General Hand's orders, to make a beginning of 
the trade. Reaching New Orleans in October, he found that 
Galvez was so ignorant of the geogra])hy of the valley that he 
had sent the goods intended for Virginia to St. Louis. Thither 
Rogers was obliged to return for them. The passage of the 
Mississippi to and fro was made with little danger, as ever since 
A]n-il, the river above New Orleans had been freed of the Eng- 
lish flag ; but later, while ascending the Ohio, and near the 
mouth of the Liekino-, the little flotilla was wnvlaid, as we have" -, , 
seen, by Hamilton's Indians, and its commander killed. / 

■^ Meanwhile, a more active career awaited Captain James 



r 



156 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

Willing o£ Philadelphia. This officer had departed from Pitts- 
burg, bearing a commission from Congress. He had less than 
fifty men ; but as his business was mainly to plunder, he picked 
up recruits as he went. One of his aims was to placate or in- 
timidate the Tory settlement about Natchez, where a body of 
loyalists had bought of the Choctaws, in 1777, a stretch along 
the river from 31° to the mouth of the Yazoo, a distance of 
something over one hundred miles. During January, Willing 
had carried a rather ruthless hand among the upper settlements 
of the river. In February, he was at Natchez, devastating the 
estates of such as had fled across the river. He seized one of 
the Tory leaders. Colonel Anthony Hutchins, and took him to 
New Orleans, where he was put on parole. The plunder which 
Willing also took away was estimated by those who suffered at 
a million and a half dollars in value. The agents of France 
in New Orleans were not altogether pleased at this kind of 
domination for the American flag, inasmuch as too much suc- 
cess might give the Republic such territorial claims on the river 
as it was not French policy to encourage. Eochel)lave, who 
commanded the British post in the Illinois, when he heard of 
the fall of Philadelphia, and that it was reported that some of 
the chief rebels were " flying by way of Fort Pitt," imagined 
that Willing's exploits were simply preparing the lower Missis- 
sippi as a refuge for disheartened patriots. 

In April, 1778, Pollock complained to Congress that a Britisli 
sloop-of-war was still capturing vessels at the river's mouth, but 
he had at least ground for rejoicing in the new commission from 
Congress, which Willing had delivered to him, and in that offi- 
cer's destruction of the Tory nest at Natchez, which had been 
supplying provisions to Pensacola and Jamaica. 

Pollock now dispatched one Reuben Harrison to Natchez 
to preserve the neutrality which Willing had instituted ; but 
Hutchins, breaking his parole, reached that post ahead, and, 
oatherino- his old associates, Harrison's boat was lured to the 
banks and captured. This for a while ended the neutrality. 
To keep the river open for the passage of supplies to the Ohio 
looked now hopeless, for the '* Hound," a vessel sent from Pen- 
sacola, was likely before long to reach a station at Manchac, 
near Baton Rouge, where her boats could patrol the river. 
Pollock's plan was for American boats coming down from above 
to avoid capture by being put under the Spanish flag. 



POLLOCK AT NEW ORLEANS. 157 

Willing was now raising men in New Orleans, and was in- 
tending to risk passing np the river with a flotilla in time to 
reach the falls of the Ohio in October, which, with liis lading 
of supplies for Fort Pitt, lie could best pass at that season. 

In April, 1778, Galvez issued a proclamation permitting trade 
with the United States. Pollock, at the same time, was fitting- 
out a captured letter of marque as an American cruiser. He 
was somewhat embarrassed for money, as he had not yet re- 
ceived from Philadelphia the 'f 36,000 due him for the supplies 
which he had sent up the river. 

Notwithstanding there had been no adhesion given as yet in 
Madrid to the American cause, it was apparent that the rep- 
resentatives of Spain and America were acting now in much 
harmony at New Orleans. The price of this informal connec- 
tion might put Spain, possessed ultimately of Florida, in a 
position to contest with the Republic the eastern bank of the 
Mississippi, as it turned out she did. 

As the summer (1778) came on, the British plans had worked 
out to their satisfaction. They controlled Natchez with a force 
of two hundred men. Another sloop-of-war, the "Sylph," with 
a crew of one hundred and fifty men, kept a body of sixty 
British rangers under cover at Manchac. Others were expected, 
for Clinton, in New York, had been aroused to the exigency. 

Pollock was accordingly obliged to bestir himself and send 
warnings up to the Arkansas to meet any boats descending the 
river. In July, two Scotch merchants in New Orleans, Eoss 
and Campbell, were found to be sending tidings to Natchez of 
intended attempts to send supplies up the river. They were 
seized and sent to Pensacola. The reestablished Tories at 
Natchez had indeed rendered the blockade of the river so effec- 
tual that Willing hesitated to start with his supplies. In 
August, however, under the escort of an armed force, led by 
Lieutenant George, he hoped to ascend the river for other 
exploits, — the expense of the undertaking being met in part 
by a loan of 86,000 from Galvez ; but nothing came of the plan. 

Pollock had been long anxious for some decisive stroke. In 
May, he had urged Congress to start an expedition from Fort 
Pitt to sweep the British from the river, and then to advance 
on Pensacola. He was confident there was not in that post, be- 
side Indians, more than eight hundred to a thousand men. He 



158 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

thought a thousand Americans could clear the Mississippi, and 
that three thousand could capture Pensacola. He had himself, 
he adds, secured a prize ship, the '' Kebecca," and put a suitable 
armament on board with one hundred and fifty men, and in two 
months he hoped to cooperate in attacking the English ship 
at Manchac. But his plans miscarried. In the autumn, the 
British control of the river was so well maintained that he was 
obliged to send Willing and his men north by sea. In Decem- 
ber, he dispatched a vessel to Havana with merchandise to be 
exchanged for supplies, which were to be sent thence to the 
United States. He had gone on spending his own money and 
receiving no remittances from Congress, which was now over 
$40,000 in his debt. He was selling his own slaves to enable 
him to meet his outstanding obligations. 

As the summer and autumn (1778) wore on, the purpose of 
France was developed. Franklin, as sole commissioner, was 
treating with Vergennes in Paris, and Gerard and Gouverneur 
Morris were conferring in Philadelphia. The object of Ver- 
gennes was unmistakable. He would, in confining the new 
Republic to the Atlantic slope, propitiate Spain, and in giving 
the region north of the Ohio, with Canada, to England, he 
would establish a constant menace between the colonies and the 
mother country, and cripple the future of the nascent Republic. 
So he talked with Franklin with as much bland concealment of 
his intention as he could, while he instructed Gerard to prepare 
Congress for submission to Sj)ain's demand. France at this 
time had eighty ships of the line and sixty-seven thousand 
sailors, and for ten years she had been drilling ten thousand 
gunners for her navy. Nevertheless, she iirged that England 
with her one hundred and fifty ships of the line (and two hun- 
dred and twenty-eight in all) was an overmatch, unless the 
sixty great shijis of Spain could be added. D'Estaing, with 
his fleet, had not certainly, during the summer, justified in 
American waters the hopes which had been entertained. There- 
fore it was necessary for America, as Vergennes represented, 
to abate her territorial pretensions and secure the alliance of 
Spain for a common good. By October (1778), it seemed as if 
Vergennes had brought Florida Blanca to consent to join the 
alliance on certain conditions. These were that the war should 



GERARD IN PHILADELPHIA. 159 

be continued till Gibraltar was gained for her, either by cap- 
ture, or by agreement at the peace ; and that America shoidil 
agree to her having Florida and the trans-Alleghauy region. 
Morris, in Philadelphia, was unfortunately showing how the 
Republic might yet give in to such demands. lie was con- 
fessing to Gerard that yielding the Mississippi to Spain and 
Canada to England might the better restrain the western com- 
munities in any arrogant hope they felt of future independence. 
There was no such hesitation about Canada in Lafayette. He 
and D'Estaing had planned for an invasion north of the St. 
Lawrence, and had sent from Boston a proclamation to arouse 
the native French of Canada. This done, D'Estaing had in 
November sailed for the West Indies, while Lafayette, two 
months later (January, 1779), went to France to work out this 
aggressive movement for the coming season. Washington saw 
the dangers of it for the Republic, as a Frenchman like Lafay- 
ette could not. The fear of the American leader that France, 
reestablished in Canada, would help the schemes of Spain on 
the Mississippi, led very soon to the abandonment of the 
project. 

Nor did a scheme of Vergennes and Charles III. of Sj^ain, 
planned at the same time, result in any action. Gerard was 
instructed to sound Congress cautiously in the matter, but Ave 
know little more of it than as a proposition to the United States 
to accept a long truce with England instead of a peace, during 
which France and Spain would have time for arranging idterior 
projects, England, however, was in no mood to come to terms 
of France's proposing after her own approaches to Congress 
had been repelled, and while France kept a fleet in the Ameri- 
can waters. It was apparent that both England and Spain 
preferred to gain time, rather than commit themselves to any 
definite arrangement. 

Early in 1779, Congress had decided (January 11) to make 
no peace without the concurrence 6f France, and it was api)ar- 
ent at what ]>rice Spain would render her aid in the war. and 
that the United States were mainly to pay the cost. CJcrard, 
instructed by Vergennes, was assiduously impressing upon Con- 
gress that the demands of Spain were proper and should be 
met ; that it was meet for Amonca to renounce territorial am- 
bition and be content with thirteen States along the Atlantic 



160 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

slope, and tliat there was great danger of an Anglo-Spanish 
league, unless Pensacola and the free navigation of the Missis- 
sippi were assured to Spain. 

Spain, meanwhile, was toying with Grantham at Madrid, 
professing a desire for alliance with England, and suggesting 
the benefits of the proposed long truce with her colonies as best 
to calm the internecine passions. At the same time she was 
shuffling with France, and waiting the results of Gerard's in- 
trigues at Philadelphia, buoyed up the while by the hope of 
regaining something of that imperial dominion in the New 
World which the bull of demarcation had assigned to her at the 
end of the fifteenth century. While Vergennes (February 12 ) 
was submitting to Spain a proposition to fight England unceas- 
ingly till America's independence was secured, leaving Spain's 
aspirations to be satisfied by wresting something from America 
in the future, Florida Blanca set no less a price on the adlie- 
sion of Spain than the old demand of Gibraltar. When their 
demands were known. Congress, on March 19, with considerable 
spirit, announced that while Spain might possess Florida, the 
American States had no intention of releasing claim to all 
that England gained below the Great Lakes by the treaty of 
1763, and to the full navigation of the Mississipjii. To make 
their intentions definite. Congress defined the bounds by a line 
from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, along the height of 
land between the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence to the north- 
west head of the Connecticut, and thence direct to the south 
end of Lake Nipissing, and on to the sources of the Mississippi, 
— of course in ignorance of just where those sources were. It 
was provided as an alternative that, if it became necessary, the 
line beyond Lake Nipissing might be run farther south, but not 
below 45°. On the south they claimed the left bank of the 
Mississippi above 31°, — the old southern bounds of the Caro- 
lina charter of 1663, which had indeed never been acknowledged 
by Spain. There was also a distinct demand on Spain for a 
port of entry on the river within Spanish Louisiana. 

While this action was pending, and the British connnander 
in New York was strengthening Pensacola with General Camp- 
bell's force of fifteen hundred men, Spain, fearing England less 
now that she had lately augmented her fleets, entered into 
a secret treaty with France on April 12, 1779, and thus joined 



SPAIN AND ENGLAND. 161 

liands ill the new triple-combination against Great Britain. 
The professed object of this clandestine alliance was to secure 
Gibraltar, and to distract England by an invasion of the British 
islands, and by attacks on Minorca, Pensacola, and Mobile. It 
is only of late years that the full text of this convention has 
become known, and Banci-oft, in his earlier editions, had allowed 
larger pretensions for Spain than were given to her. 

Six days after the treaty had been concluded, Spain made 
other perfidious propositions for alliance with England, and 
these being rejected, on jMay 3, 1779, she openly declared war. 
There was now no further doubt on England's part of what she 
was to encounter. In the early part of the summer the Euro- 
pean parties to the conflict were manoeuvring for an advan- 
tage, while Congress was at the same time facing a serious 
complication in the evident purpose of France and Spain to 
insist on recognizing England's territorial pretensions in the 
Quebec act. France saw that this gave Spain a better chance 
of wresting the country north of the Ohio from England, — as 
indeed was attempted by Spanish troo])s in 1781, — than from 
the grasp which Virginia was preparing to make u])on it, and 
did make in 1779. 

On June 17, 1779, Germain notified Ilaldimand of the Span- 
ish war, and instructed him to reduce the Spanish posts on the 
Mississippi and assault New Orleans. At the very beginning 
of the year (1779) Hamilton, at Vincennes, had reported that 
, the southern Indians, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Choctaws, and 
j Alibaiiions, had been banded in the British interests, and that 
j were he sure that Spain had declared war, he could, with the 
1 aid of the savages, push the Spaniards from the Mississi})pi, 
since, as he, affirms, the Spanish authorities had but slender 
I influence with the tribes. The British commander at Pensacola 
1 had also had his emissaries amono- the Cherokees, and within 
i a month from the time wlien Ilaldimand was prompted by Ger- 
i main to attack the Spanish, these savage marauders were harry- 
I ing the confines of Carolina. Arthur Lee had anticipated this, 
and while Germain was writing to Ilaldimand, Lee was warning 
i Spain that a British foothold in Carolina meant the use of it 
k as a base to dispatch the Indians against the Spaniards on the 
i ! Gulf. Already, by a pact with the tribes, the Chickasaws and 
i 1 Choctaws were scattered along the Ohio and Mississippi to 



162 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

intercept supplies from New Orleans, in ease they had run the 
gauntlet at Natchez, where some English rangers under Captain 
Bloomer were now stationed. 

This was the condition in the Great Valley, and such were the 
English intentions, when Galvez, the young Spanish governor 
at New Orleans, threw himself into the war with admirable 
spirit. As early as March. 1779, Patrick Henry had urged 
upon \\'^ashington to dispatch an expedition against Natchez 
to preserve communications with New Orleans from the up- 
country, since Pollock's shipments of munitions and supplies 
by the river had become uncertain. Little heed, however, had 
been given to the advice, and at this time there was a small 
chance that Campbell at Pensacola and Hamilton at Vincennes 
might be able to work in conjunction and maintain the blockade 
of the river, if not drive the Spaniards out. 

On July 8, the Madrid authorities had sent instructions to 
Galvez for an active campaign. The proclamation of hostili- 
ties with England had been made at Havana on July 22, and 
Galvez was soon aware of the British purpose, which he learned 
from an intercepted dispatch. 

By August 18, he had fitted out a flotilla, when a hurricane, 
sweeping the river, sank his vessels. His energy soon replaced 
them. Accompanied by Pollock — to whom Galvez had im- 
successfully offered a Spanish commission — and a few other 
Americans, who ])referred to carry their own flag as a separate 
detachment, and with a following of six hundred and seventy 
men, Galvez began the ascent of the river. On September 7, 
with a force increased at this time to over fourteen hundred 
men, he approached the southernmost point held by the British, 
Bayou Manchac, where he carried Fort Bute by assault. He 
was now one hundred and fifteen miles above New Orleans, and 
from this point to Natchez the British were in possession. A 
week afterwards (September 13), he began regular approaches 
before the fort at Baton Eouge, and eight days later it surren- 
dered, and carried with it Fort Panmure at Natchez, the suc- 
cessor on the same site of the old Fort Eosalie of the Natchez 
wars. Colonel Hutchins, the pai\amount British authority in the 
region, and a traitoi-ous sneak by nature, left it to Colonel 
Dickson to make the surrender. 

Several hundred prisoners, large supplies, and various trans- 



JOHN ADAMS. 163 

ports thus fell into Spanish hands, and Galvez returned to New 
Orleans to extend Louisiana over Florida, as far as the Pearl 
River, and to welcome in October some reinforcements from 
Havana. 

These successes encouraged Pollock, who was just now much 
in need of good cheer. With Continental money in circulation 
to about !|200,000,000, and reduced to an insignificant value. 
Congress had failed to keep with him its promises of remittances, 
and, to make matters worse, iu)t a single vessel of those he had 
sent north by sea with supplies had escaped the British block- 
aders. About the only produce which Congress could depend 
upon to keep Pollock in funds was flour, and it was practically 
under an embargo in the Atlantic ports, so much of it had 
been needed to feed the army and D'Estaing's fleet. Nor could 
relief be immediate. There had never before been so fine a 
crop of wheat in the States, but it would take time to grind 
and bolt it, and to send it to New Orleans amid the risks of 
capture. 

While affairs were thus prosperous at New Orleans for 
Spain, and American interests were with increasing- difficulty 
sustained by Pollock, Congress had been struggling with the 
(piestion of the ultimate bounds of the new Republic, and now 
in the instruction given (August 14) to John Adams, who was 
about going- abroad prepared to treat with Great Britain, it 
had substantially agreed upon the limits set by that body some 
months before. 

Adams was just at this time in a rampant state of mind, — a 
condition not unusual with him, — and in a letter from Brain- 
tree (August 4), while Congress was coming to its purpose, he 
had not only objected to the surrender to Great Britain of 
Nova Scotia and Canada, but he had pictured, in ignorance of 
her secret intentions, the great complacency of Spain, which he 
judged would make her an agreeable neighbor in the future. 
But Congress, before its president could have received Adams's 
letter, declared, on August 5, that if Great Britain persisted 
" in the prosecution of the present unjust war," advances 
should be made to enter into a defensive and offensive alliance 
with France and Spain jointly, to the end of gaining Canada, 
Florida, and the free navigation of the Mississippi. It only 



164 THE SINISTER PURPOSES OF FRANCE. 

shows how little the true character of Spanish and French pur- 
jjoses was understood in Congress, that it could have hoped to 
bring at that time those powers to assure the States any one of 
those three conditions. 

The same propositions were again brought under discussion 
on September 9, when the terms of a treaty with Spain were 
considered, and two days later it was determined to agree to 
join Spain in an invasion of Florida and the conquest of Pensa- 
cola, but only on condition of her granting the free navigation 
of the Mississippi, with a port of entry below 31°. Matters 
between them woidd run smoother, it was interjected, if Spain 
would advance the States the sum of five million dollars. In 
this frame of mind Congress committed the Spanish mission to 
Jay on September 27, and two days later passed his instruc- 
tions in accordance. 

Neither France nor Spain was prepared to accept such 
terms, and the French minister at Philadelphia renewed his 
protests and pictured the future misery of a republic too large 
to hold together, — a future of disintegration that was much to 
the mind of Yergennes. Virginia, the most intei'ested of the 
colonies in this territorial integrity, was nrgently instructing 
her delegates never to think of yielding to the Spanish claim. 

Meanwhile, on August 2, a successor to Gerard in Luzerne 
had landed at Boston. Thence he made his way to West Point, 
to confer with Washington. The new envoy inqnired of the 
commander-in-chief how far his army could be depended upon 
in an attack on Florida. Washington was waiy, and we have 
the notes of the talk, made by Hamilton, who acted as inter- 
preter. By these it appears that Washington thought it might 
be possible to assist in that enterprise, if Congress thought well 
of it, and the British were driven from Georgia and South Car- 
olina. There was liere a confirmation of Arthur Lee's opinion 
of the difficulty of holding Florida, with the enemy in those 
States. 

This attempt to engage Washington independent of Con- 
gress was quite in accordance with the purpose of Vergennes to 
make the several States agree on their own parts to the treaties. 
Vergennes's object was thereby to ])erpetuate better the influence 
of France among them, — a condition which that minister never 
lost sio'ht of in view of an ultimate arrreement with Great Brit- 



THE FRENCH PEOPLE. 165 

ain. In September, lie plainly intimated to his confidants that 
while it was to be hoped that the United States would hold 
compact till their independence was secured, the interest of 
France required after such an event that the union should be 
broken, in order that it should not become a power dangerous to 
France and her aspirations. That there was among the French 
people and in the French military and naval contingent a wide 
sympathy for the cause of American inde]iendence is true ; but 
it was emasculated by the perfidy of their ministry. America's 
obligation to what stood at that time politically for France was 
much like the dependence of an unfortunate spendthrift upon 
a calculating pawnbroker. It is a misuse of words to call this 
obligation by the name of gratitude. 

What Hamilton divined in that day has been abundantly 
proved by the publication of evidence in our day : " The dis- 
memberment of this countrj^ from Great Britain was both a 
determinary motive and an adequate compensation to France 
for the assistance afforded." Again he says : "If a service is 
rendered for . . . the immediate interests of the party who 
performs it, and is productive of reciprocal advantages, there 
seems scarcely an adequate basis for a sentiment like that of 
gratitude. . . . To suppose that France was actuated bj'" friend- 
ship . . . is to be ignorant of the springs of action which inva- 
riably regulate the cabinets of princes." 

In following the course of France in our Revolutionary War, 
there is every reason to emancipate ourselves from predilec- 
tions, prejudice, and tradition, the three great ensnarers of 
seekers for historical truth. 



CHAPTER X. 

A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

1780. 

Virginia had persistently nurtured her territorial claims to 
the northwest ever since the treaty of 1763 had brought this 
over-mountain region under British control, and the royal proc- 
lamation had formulated an issue. She had resented the pre- 
tensions of that proclamation in constituting this ten'itory 
" crown lands '' for Indian occupancy. She had rehearsed her 
claims till the other colonies were tired of them. She had 
never once questioned, as others had, that the English king, in 
1609, had any right to assume jurisdiction beyond the springs 
of her rivers. She made no account of the annulment of her 
charter in 1624, and claimed that the recognition of her 
" ancient bound " by the English Commonwealth in 1651 dis- 
posed of that objection. She recalled how, in 1749, the royal 
instructions to Governor Gooch had recognized both banks of 
the Ohio as being " within our colony of Vii-ginia." When 
England got her real title to the trans-Alleghany regions in 
1763, she called it merely a confirmation of her imnmtable 
charter. She pronounced solemnly, by legislative enactment, 
that the Indiana deed of 1768 was void. She saw no reason 
why Trent and the traders should be recompensed for losses in 
the Pontiac war any more than others who suffered damage 
from the same cause, and if the traders were to be favored, she 
held that Pennsylvania and not Virginia should recoup them, 
since they belonged to that colony. George Mason, in her 
behalf, charged Sir William Johnson " with mysterious and 
clandestine conduct " in furthering that grant, for Virginia had 
already preempted the very land from tlie Indians at the treaty 
of Lancaster. She saw nothing in the Walpole grant of 1772 
as sustaining the rights of the crown against her claims. She 
saw no way for the Republic to maintain its rights at the future 



THE CONFEDERATION. 167 

peace against the limits of the Quehec Bill, hut in standing 
squarely upon Virginia's chartered rights. 

We have seen how soon the frontiersmen began to make 
inroads on this royal reservation of 17G3, and how the rights 
of the Iroquois and Cherokees, as affiliated with the northern 
and southern colonies respectively, were played off against each 
other. If the New York claim, as derived from the Iroquois, 
was illusor^^, Franklin could, on the other hand, charge Vir- 
li'inia with inventinu' the claims of the Cherokees to the Ken- 
tucky region in order to bolster up her charter right. In a 
draft of an act of confederation for the colonies, when war had 
become inevitable, Fraiddin had, in 1775, aimed to bring- the 
claims of Virginia to a tribunal. In this draft he made all 
disputes as to bounds between colonies referable to Congress. 
In it he also gave to that body the same right which he had 
recoguized earlier to be in Parliament, to plant new colonies in 
this western wilderness. The next year, June 29, 1776, Vir- 
ginia, in adopting her new State Constitution, which the war 
had forced upon her, stood squarely by her old i)retensions of 
jurisdiction in this region, with the right of establishing one 
or more States within her charter limits. 

A few weeks later, in Congress, John Dickinson presented 
(July 12, 1776) the articles for confederation in a new shape, 
destined in the main to be those under which the States finally 
achieved their independence. The draft provided that no lands 
could be purchased of the natives, either by any colony or by 
an individual, before the limits of the colonies westward were 
adjudicated upon, and that, when these limits were determined, 
the confederacy was to guarantee such bounds to the colonies, 
and no purchases were to be made beyond them except by the 
United States for the general benefit of all the States. It dis- 
tinctly provided that Congress should have the power to settle 
intercolonial boundary disputes ; to *•' limit those bounds which 
by charter, or proclamation, or under any pretense, are said to 
extend to the South Sea:" and to "assign territories for new 
colonies and ascertain their boundaries," which may l)e admitted 
to the confederacy by the assent of nine States. Canada, at the 
same time, could join the confederacy at her own pleasure. These 
articles, if ado})ted and assented to, practically made Congress 
the arena in which Virginia must contend for her pretensions. 



108 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

While this matter was still in abeyance, Congress made a dis- 
tinct assertion of its control over these western regions by 
resolving on September 16, 1776, to grant lands over the moun- 
tains as bounties to the Continental troops. This meant recom- 
pensing Virginia for yielding for this purpose such lands as 
should be selected. Maryland at once (October 9) announced 
her objection to making such payments a charge upon all the 
States and a benefit to one, and on November 13, 1776, Mary- 
land's protest to this effect was laid before Congress. The 
position of this dissentient State is best expressed in instructions 
to her delegates at a later stage of the controversy : " Policy 
and justice require that a country unsettled at the commence- 
ment of this war, claimed by the British crown, and ceded to 
it by the Treaty of Paris, if wrested from the common enemy 
by the blood and treasure of the thirteen States, should be con- 
sidered as a common property, subject to be parceled out with 
free governments." 

It was now clear that the smaller States, and those which had 
no such western claims, were prepared to insist upon making 
these trans- Alleghany lands a common source of financial sup- 
ply in the struggle with the mother country. Congress moved 
slowly in a matter which produced such variances of opinion, 
and it was not till October 14, 1777, that it dared even ap- 
proach the question. It then directed that the colonies slioidd 
have a common treasury, and that there should be a system of 
proportionate taxation among the States to supply this treasury. 
The next day, October 15, 1777, Maryland tried to force the 
issue by proposing that Congress should have the power to 
set a western limit to the States claiming to the Mississippi, so 
as to create a i)ublic domain beyond. Maryland stood alone 
in the vote. Within a fortnight, the larger States combined 
(October 27) to make it a provision of the impending act of 
confederation that no State without its consent should be 
stripped of its territory for the benefit of the United States. 
Within three weeks, the Dickinson draft, with all the land 
amendments which Virginia had insisted upon, was adoi)ted 
(November 15, 1777), subject to the ratification of the States. 

It was soon apparent that the confederation would not have 
the support of Maryland without some acknowledgment of the 
rights of all the States in these western lands. By early summer 



VIRGINIA LAND OFFICE. 1G9 

ill the following- year (June, 1778), Maryland, with Delaware, 
New Jersey, and Khode Island acting- mainly in accord with 
her, tried to induce Congress to remove difficulties by voting 
that commissioners should determine the limits of the States 
claiming- to the Mississippi, and that the fee of the old " crown 
lands," under the proclamation of 1763, should belong- to the 
United States, while the original claimant States should retain 
jurisdiction. Congress declined to accede to the proposition, 
and on July 10, 1778, appealed to the hesitating- States to 
accept the articles, and leave the settlement of their demands 
to the future. 

It soon became known that Virginia had substantiated her 
claim north of the Ohio by the success of Clark, and in October 
she set up, as we have seen, a civil government at Kaskaskia. 

Two months later, Maryland set forth the grounds of her 
position in refusing- to accept the Act of Confederation, and the 
new year opened with Congress further temporizing- by post- 
l)oning- on January 6, 1779, the consideration of Maryland's 
declaration. 

In May, 1779, Virginia aggressively determined to open a land 
office in the territory, offering- the land at forty pounds the hun- 
dred acres, and declaring valid all her existing military grants. 
This again aroused Maryland, and she instructed her delegates 
to lay before Congress her protest against this project. This 
forced Virginia to a new rehearsal of her claims. There was 
with some an attemi)t to throw disre]Hite upon Maryland's will- 
ingness to exempt from her general contention such tracts as 
had been " granted to, surveyed for, or purchased by individuals 
before the commencement of the present war," by tracing it to 
a purpose to save a grant between the Wabash and the Illinois, 
which, in 1773, had been made to Governor Johnston of Mary- 
land in conjunction with Dunmore and Tryon. 

Some of these earlier grantees did unite in September. 1779, 
in presenting a memorial to Congress, in which the representa- 
tives of the Indiana and Vandalia companies were included. 
In this paper they asked to have Virginia's purpose of disposing 
of these lands in October prevented. This led to a vote asking 
the States to make no grants of such lands while the war lasted. 
Virginia defended her right to open a land office, but the mo- 
tion prevailed (October 30) despite the opposition of herself 
and North Carolina. 



170 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

The manifestly increasing' antagonism to Virginia's extreme 
claim did not prevent her still making grants (October) of 
these same lands to her soldiers, and taking steps to open new 
routes over the Cumberland Mountains. As confidence in- 
creased in the ultimate solution of the question against the 
Virginia pretensions, Delaware had already accepted the Act of 
Confederation in February, 1779, and in November New Jersey 
did the same, but both States had done it under protest. Near 
the end of the year (December 14, 1779), Virginia's remon- 
strances grew milder. She was willing to listen to " just and 
reasonable propositions for removing ostensible causes of delay 
to the complete ratification of the Confederation," and to grant 
lands within her charter bounds to the continental line of any 
or all the States. In obtaining this concession, Maryland had 
scored a triumph. 

Such was the condition of the controversy in Congress, when, 
in the opening of 1780, it had become generally recognized that 
the future trans-Alleghany extension, both of the claimant 
States and of the new Republic, depended on the success of the 
military and pioneer movements on each side of the Ohio. 
Ilaldimand had begun a system of canals round the rapids of 
the St. Lawrence, which did much to facilitate pushing of sup- 
plies to his western posts, but British attempts to enforce the 
pretension of the Quebec Bill on the north of the Ohio, in 
efforts directed from Detroit and Mackinac, had so far failed, 
notwithstanding the sympathy of the Indian tribes. South of 
the Ohio the adventurous pioneers had strengthened their hold 
upon the regions of Kentucky and Tennessee in spite of British 
and savage raids from north of the Ohio, and threats of the 
British agents, Stuart and Cameron, from the side of Florida. 
The frontiersmen's success had also so far put an obstacle in 
the way of the Spanish pretensions, which France was anxious 
to advance. 

The Americans had little more than a hope of holding their 
western positions north of the Ohio. The expectation of ad- 
vancing on Detroit was for the present, at least, kept in abey- 
ance. On the British side the plans of the ministry, committed 
in the north to Haldimand, were thus in the hands of one who 
had no hesitation in espousing all that the Quebec Bill intended. 



ST. LOUIS THREATENED. 171 

The plan of Germain to maintain a line of communication be- 
tween Canada and Florida had indeed been checked by the 
precipitate action of Galvez at New Orleans, bnt it did not, in 
their ignorance of the Spanish successes, seem altogether imprac- 
ticable to Sinclair, or to his superior officer at Quebec. The 
commandant at Mackinac was not informed of the fall of 
Natchez till midsummer (July 30), when the tidings came from 
Haldimaud, who had learned of the misfortune but six weeks 
before. 

Thus in the dark, and supposing that Brigadier Campbell, 
leaving Pensacola, would enter the Mississippi some time in 
JSIay, Sinclair, when in February the days were palpably length- 
ening, sent messages to the Sioux and other tribes to unite in 
the early spring of 1780 at the Wisconsin portage, and to bring 
with them supplies of corn for a campaign. At the same time 
he urged Wabasha, his Sioux ally, " a man of uncommon abili- 
ties," to move with his " people undebauched and addicted to 
war " down the Mississippi towards Natchez, there to act as 
circumstances might require. 

To divert the rebel attention from this main part of the cam- 
paign, Ilaldimand had instructed (February 12) De Peyster, at 
Detroit, to arouse the Wabash Indians, and "' anmse " Clark, 
or drive him from the Ohio rapids, " otherwise the Indian 
country will be open to the continual incursions of the rebels, 
and safe communication will be formed between Fort Pitt and 
the Mississippi." The British authorities were soon to learn, 
if they had not already been informed, by an intercejited letter, 
of Clark's purpose to build a new fort on the Mississippi. 

It was March (1780) when the Spaniards at St. Louis learned 
of Sinclair's plans, and a few weeks later, in April, some boats, 
with supplies which Gratiot had carried up to Prairie du (^hien, 
were captured by the approaching band. 

St. Louis was now a town of a hundred and twenty houses, 
principally of stone, with a population of perhaps eight hun- 
dred, mainly French, and a hundred and fifty negroes. On 
May 2G, 1780, a force, thought to have comi)rised about nine 
hundred Indians, fell upon some farmers, who incautiously — 
for the enemy's approach was known — had gone beyond the 
protection of the stockade. Sinclair had hardly feared that 
the savaires woidd fail in an assault ; but he was not so confi- 



172 



A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 




J 

FORTIFICATIONS 

The cut, sliowing their relations to the town as it was in 1822, is from L. E. Beck's Gazetteer of 
(J. round tower, h. blockhouse. (. Catholic Chapel. A-. Baptist Church. I. jail. m. Presby- 

deiit in holding the place, if once taken. But no assault fol- 
lowed, partly because of the usual savage unwillingness to 
attack a post which had been forewarned, and partly because 
of the lukewai'mness, if not insincerity, of Calve and the other 
French leaders of the Indians. The break came when the Sacs 
and Foxes, alleged to be under Calve's influence, swerved from 
the task. 

It is thought that the whole force, which Sinclair had organ- 
ized, consisted of perhaps fifteen hundred warriors with Euro- 
pean leaders, while a body of other savages with a number of 



SIN CLA Hi 'S EXPEDI TION. 



173 



STRKET 

f^^ 1^:^ FiSf5 



a 1^:^ pi»f^ irw 

1 Pr i 




'd i i J 



n 



i \ A 



P F I 

OF ST. LOUIS, 17S0. 

Illinois and Missouri, KXbany, 1823. 
terian meeting-house, n. market. 




Key: n. line of works. 6. tower, c. ileiui-luuar. 
J. Missouri bank. p. ferrj-. (/. old wiiulniill. ;•. 



/. g.ates. 
ox-mill. 



French traders, inspired by Sinclair's promise to reserve to tliem 
the traffic of the Missouri valley, had been led by Langlade by 
way of the Chicago portage. This contingent was expected to 
fall upon Kaskaskia in case of success at St. Louis, and to 
place the Illinois villages under contribution, and to send sup- 
plies from them to Green J^ay and ^Mackinac, — the sui)port of 
w^hich post was at this time creating inueh complaint in the 
communications of Germain. Langlade had for a guide a 
certain Monsieur Durrand, who had been found with a (piantity 
of continental money in his possession, and to secure his fidelity 
Sinclair had taken possession of all his ]-)roperty. 



174 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

When the commander at St. Louis had learned of his danger, 
he had sent word to Clark. Early in the year, Jefferson, the 
better to secure the Virginia title to the Kentucky region, had 
directed Colonel Thomas Walker and Colonel Smythe to extend 
the line which separated Virginia from Carolina to the Missis- 
sippi, and at a point where it reached that river (36° 30') 
Clark had been instructed to build a fort. The site of this pro- 
posed stockade, known as Iron Banks, was about five miles 
below the mouth of the Ohio, in the country of the Chickasaws 
and Choctaws, who soon manifested their enmity. The spot 
had attracted Governor Henry's attention as early as January, 
1778, and Clark in September, 1779, had issued orders to induce 
settlers to occupy it. Todd had at the same time made sundry 
grants, not far distant. Leaving that post to protect the Ken- 
tucky settlements from other raids, when the news reached him 
from St. Louis Clark immediately responded, and twenty-four 
hours before Wabasha and his horde apj)roached St. Louis, he 
was on the opposite side of the river at Cahokia, watching for 
his opportunity. He had no occasion either to cross the Mis- 
sissippi or to defend Kaskaskia, and found nothing to do but 
to dispatch Lieutenant Montgomery to pursue the retreating 
enemy. 

By June 4 (1780), the first of the fugitive savages reached 
Mackinac, those under Calve coming by Green Bay, while 
others returned by Chicago. They reported that they had 
killed about seventy persons, had taken thirty-four prisoners, 
and they showed forty-three scalps. Sinclair at once sent two 
vessels to the Chicago Eiver to bring off the main body of 
Langlade's men. This was done in time for them to escape 
the attack of a mounted American force, which a few days later 
appeared at that point. 

So ended ignominiously the attempt to control the INIissis- 
sippi from the north. Sinclair brooded on his disai)pointment 
for seven or eight weeks before he got some relief by learning, as 
we have seen, that he had not been alone disappointed, for there 
had been a similar disaster inflicted nine months before by 
Galvez in the lower parts of the Mississippi. 

The British force, with which Haldimand had intended to 
" amuse " Clark while Sinclair's expedition followed the Missis- 



i 



BIRD'S EXPEDITION. 175 

sippi, left Detroit near the middle of April, 1780, under the 
eonnuand of Captain Henry Bird. It consisted of about six 
hundred men, led by Elliot and the Girtys. It had been fitted 
out at a charge of about #300,000. Logan, with a band of 
savages, accompanied it, while a force of Huron warriors had 
at the same time started in the direction of Fort Pitt, to rivet 
the rebels' attention in tliat direction and intercept any foray 
of Virginians on the upper Ohio. It was supposed by the tribes 
that retaliation for the continual attacks on emigrant boats 
might incite such inroads, and for the fear of such reprisals the 
Mingoes and Delawares had l>een much alarmed. 

Bird had passed by the Maumee portage to the Great Miami, 
and on the way Alexander McKee had joined him with some 
five Imndred Shawnees. The varying reports of his entire force 
would seem to indicate that the fickle savages came and went on 
the march as they liked. The information which Bird got at 
Lorimer's Station showed that Clark was at the falls with two 
hundred men, poorly supplied. Bird's purpose, as Haldimand 
had directed, was to attack that post, and he had with him two 
small cannon, the first guns that h:id been taken into Indian 
warfare. 

His Indians, however, proved unruly. Haldimand liad 
warned him tliat savages cared more to have raids projected 
for which they could get advanced gifts, than to participate in 
unrequited forays, and Bird's experience did not belie the warn- 
ing. His red brutes killed his cattle, grew insubordinate, and 
finally refused to advance towards the falls. Not wholly to 
fail of results. Bird turned towards the month of the Licking 
and, ascending that stream, captured several Kentucky stations, 
and took a large number of prisoners. Having accomplished 
no strategic purpose, he suddenly turned back, his captives 
bearing the plunder, and reached Detroit on August 4. He 
might have inflicted serious mischief on the river by stopping 
to waylay the emigrant boats, for something like three hundred 
of them, averaging perhaps fifty feet in length, and carrying 
ten persons each, it is supjjosed, reached the falls during the 
season. His precipitate retreat, however, saved him from 
Clark, who was now afield with a force he had raised in Ken- 
tucky. Clark carried a rather high hand in gathering his men, 
for he shut the land offices to throw the speculators out of em- 



176 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

ployment, and stationed guards on the outward trails to take 
the arms from fugitives. In this way he gathered at the site of 
Cincinnati — opposite the Licking — about a thousand riflemen, 
mounted or afoot, and built there a blockhouse on the site of 
the future city. It was August 2 — the reports of the date 
are somewhat uncertain — when he went forward, carrying a 
single cannon in his train. Having moved some fifty or sixty 
miles, in dismal weather, he found, on August 6, the Indian vil- 
lage at Chillicothe in flames. He hurried on to Piqua on the 
Little Miami, in the region of the modern Springfield. After 
a conflict, in which he got no assistance from Benjamin Logan, 
who had gone astray with one division of his force, he scattered 
the Indians, who under two of the Girtys somewhat stubbornly 
confronted him, though Clark brought his three-pounder into 
action. He then burned the town and destroyed the neighbor- 
ing cornfields. He had succeeded in inflicting such a retaliatory 
stroke as to save Kentucky from savage raids for the rest of 
the season. Clark returned to the falls, his force scattering, on 
the way, to their homes. 

All this, however, was too late to alarm Detroit seriously-. 
If Jefferson could have compassed it, he would have kept Clark 
to the larger project of seizing the straits. Early in the year 
(February 10), while uninformed of Sinclair's intentions, Jef- 
ferson had written to Washington to inquire if there was truth 
in the rumor that Colonel Brodhead was to be sent against 
Detroit from Fort Pitt. He added that " these officers [Clark 
and Brodhead] cannot act together," and if Brodhead was to 
lead an attack on the straits, he would see that Clai'k was sent 
in some other direction. Ten days later (Februar}' 21), Brod- 
head had learned from prisoners that there were four hundred 
and fifty men at Detroit and eighteen hundred at Niagara, beside 
large hordes of Indians. The numbers troubled him, and he 
begged Washington to make a diversion on the Susquehanna 
to check any hostile incursion by the Alleghany. 

On March 18, Brodhead informed Washington that he had 
heard fi*om Clark, who was willing to cooperate with him, 
" either for the reduction of one of the enemy's })osts or against 
the Indian towns," and that Clark expected to be reinforced in 
the spring. At the same time (March) Jefferson, who had 



DETROIT. 177 

perhaps inisjiidged Clark, wrote to this officer that he must 
abandon all lioi)e of advancing- on Detroit. This letter was 
intercepted, and probably banished the anxiety which De Pev- 
ster had before that felt. 

By April, reinforcements and supplies not reaching him, 
Brodhead informed Washington (24th) that unless Clark could 
join him, Detroit could not be threatened. He complained that 
the boundary dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania, and 
the necessity of i)rotecting the local frontiers, had prevented his 
summoning any militia. Clark, as we have seen, was too much 
needed at this time at St. Louis to think even of making a 
diversion up the Ohio. Brodhead did not willingly abandon 
all hope, and tried to get other and perhaps better tidings of 
the British force. A scouting party which he sent towards 
Sandusky had returned (June 30) without success. Ten days 
later (July 10), Brodhead outlined to his lieutenants a march 
so far as Sandusky at least, but his pur2)ose was discovered, and 
the plan was abandoned. Just as this proved futile, an onset 
from the side of Cahokia was attempted and likewise failed. 
Colonel La Balme, a man bred to the cavahy service, with a 
few score (perhaps a hundred) French and Indians, had started 
to surprise Detroit, thinking to arouse the French of the straits 
to welcome him. His foi'ce, however, was entrapped one night 
on the iNIiami, their leader killed, and his papers taken. This 
must have relieved Haldimand of some anxiety. 

So the season (1780) ended with much the same equal dis- 
tribution of loss and gain which had characterized the last two 
years, north of the Ohio. The English had pretty well kei)t 
their hold on the tribes. The death of White Eyes, the friend 
of Zeisberger and the chief of the peace party of the Delawares, 
liad left that faction without a head, and it had gone over to 
the royal side. At the west, however, the Sacs and Foxes had 
pronounced for the Americans. Practically, neither side could 
claim to have made good their territorial pretensions ; and there 
was continued ai)prehension on both sides well on to snow-fly- 
ing. Guy Johnson, commanding- at Niagara, and Governor 
Todd in Kentucky, were growing more and more anxious ; Clark, 
at the falls, was in greater trepidation than De Peyster, at the 
straits. Brodhead, at Pittsburg, was complaining- of the want 



178 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

of money, credit, and provisions, and was alarmed at rumors of 
a British advance from Detroit. 

But on the whole the year (1780) had given better promise 
south of the Ohio. Clark had established Fort Jefferson, but 
it had only been maintained by lighting the Indians about 
it. The situation was insalubrious ; it was difficult to keep it 
supplied ; settlers did not like the neighborhood, and finally, 
its garrison being needed elsewhere, it was the next year 
abandoned. 

The fight at King's Mountain (October 7) had drawn off a 
large part of the fighting militia of Virginia and North Caro- 
lina, and the Cherokees had seized the opportunity to rise upon 
the exposed settlements. Retribution came to them suddenly. 
The heroes who had gained the brilliant victory — which is 
later to be described — rendezvoused, under Sevier, Martin, 
and Campbell, on the French Broad, and rushed upon the Cher- 
okee towns. These attacks laid twenty-nine of the savages 
low ; seventeen were taken prisoners, and fifty thousand bushels 
of corn were destroyed. But one American was killed. The 
campaign over, Coloiiel Campbell (January 16, 1781) reported 
to Congress the desirability of erecting a fort at the junction 
of the Tennessee and Holston river^, the better to hold the 
country. 

But notliing, meanwhile, seemed to daunt the eager settlers. 
For some years to come, they came into this wilderness at the 
rate of four or five thousand ainiually. They came both by flo- 
tilla on the Ohio, and by the Wilderness road. Two years later, 
there were twelve thousand souls in Kentucky, and in 1784, it 
is comj^uted there were as many as thirty thousand. The dis- 
covery of numerous salt-springs had conduced to this stirprising 
influx, for the price of that condiment had for some time been 
almost prohibitory. Virginia had divided the country into 
three counties, each with its lieutenant, and all three subordi- 
nate to Clark as general commanding. The old system of gain- 
ing a fixed extent of soil by squatter right had given place to 
treasury warrants, carrying acreages, which were variable, but 
defined. The new system was hardly in consonance with the 
habits of the squatter population earlier on the soil. In some 



CUMBERLAND SETTLEMENTS. 179 

respects, the ways of life in Kentucky were becoming irksome. 
The laws of Virginia were in some aspects burdensome under 
their remote conditions. To carry appeals from local justices 
to Williamsburg was costly. There was a constant tendency 
in the older communities to underrate their forbearance with 
the Indians. 

As the result of such discontent, some six hundred and forty 
residents on both sides of the Ohio, in Kentucky and Illinois, 
united in May, 1780, in a petition to Congress to be set up as 
a separate State, and left to manage their own internal affairs. 
The movement proved premature, and was doubtless immature, 
and there was no evidence that it was countenanced by many of 
the stabler and more experienced pioneers. The east had its 
complaints at the same time, and it was not unusual to hear in 
Congress more or less apprehension that the " freedom from 
taxes, militia duties, and other burdens," as well as the allure- 
ments of the land offices, in Kentucky, were enticing deserters 
from the Continental armies. 

Robertson of Watauga, accompanied by some Holston adven- 
turers, seeking new trails and fairer lands, had, as we have 
seen, during the previous autumn (1779), seized ui)on the bend 
of the Cumberland, known as the French Lick, and was now 
compacting the new settlement. Late in the winter of 1779- 
80, Colonel Donelson, a sharer with Robertson in the move- 
ment, with thirty boats, carrying some two or three hundred 
souls, including the less hardy of the men, but largely composed 
of the women and children, — and among them the future wife 
of Andrew Jackson, — had started on a perilous voyage down 
the Tennessee, and up tlie Ohio and Cumberland, to the ap- 
pointed spot. It was not the first nor the last of such river 
expeditions ; but it has become better known than the others, 
owing to the preservation of the leader's diary. This record 
shows the hazards of the wintry stream, and how the flotilla, 
beset by small-pox, was whirled in the rifts, and ran the fusil- 
lades of the cunning Chickamaugas. After all their trials, the 
new-comers poled their bateaux up to the Cumberland bluffs 
on April 24, 1780, and were welcomed by Robertson. They 
found that a stockaded village had been laid out. It was 
named Nashborough, after the governor of North Carolina, 



180 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

when it had been found to be within the charter limits o£ that 
State. The popuhition now scattered along the banks of the 
Cumberland was thought to number not far from five hundred. 
Some among them had been renegades from the Atlantic slope, 
to escape the marauding forces of Cornwallis. Robertson, 
before the decision of the settlement's allegiance was settled, 
had been in conference with Clark about a title to the lands ; 
but the same survey, as conducted by Henderson for North 
Carolina and Walker for Virginia, which had fixed for Clark 
the site of Fort Jefferson, had also determined the new settle- 
ment to be beyond the jurisdiction of Virginia. 

Three hundred miles of forest separated it from all neigh- 
borly succor. Its people were adventurers, but they had 
known the value of orderly government on the Holston, and 
accordingly, at a meeting convened at Nashborough on May 
1, 1780, Robertson presented some articles of association, and 
they were readily adopted. They are supposed to reflect the 
form of the constitution of Watauga, which has not been 
saved for us, but of this imitation we fortunately have nearly 
the whole, with the amendments shortly after adopted. The 
two hundred and fifty-six males who signed it declared their 
purpose to " restrain the licentious and supply the blessings 
flowing from a just and equitable government.'' It is a token 
of the bloody conditions of their life, that of these two hundred 
and fifty-six subscribers, mainly in vigorous early manhood, 
scarce a score were alive a dozen years later, and it is said that 
only one man among the departed had been known to die a 
natural death. Nothing better than this shows what living was 
in these isolated settlements. If food and powder gave out, it 
meant a stealtliy march, amid lurking savages, to the nearest 
and better supplied settlements. Nothing but the dauntless- 
ness of a military leader like Robertson could hold such com- 
munities to the task of subduing the wilderness. He was now, 
under their new articles, the chairman of their board of " judges, 
triers, and general arbitrators," and with universal suffrage to 
support him, he was to administer the executive business of the 
little community till North Carolina set up a county govern- 
ment in the region in 1783. 

The whole region of Tennessee and Kentucky had been 
threatened by the success of the British at Charleston in May 



GALVEZ AND POLLOCK. 181 

(1780), and by the imbecility of Gates at Camden in August. 
But the over-mountain men from Holston, under Shelby and 
Sevier, aided by a regiment of Virginians under Colonel Wil- 
liam Campbell, had rallied to a self-imposed task and retrieved 
those defeats. Mounted almost to a man, with evergreen sprigs 
in their coon-skin caps, they had followed their leaders through 
the passes, a thousand in number, and perhaps many more, for 
the reports are at variance. At King's IMountain, in October, 
1780, they encompassed Fergusson and the loyalist militia from 
the Carolina coast. The backwoodsmen wonderfully proved 
their wily courage, man tu man alike in numbers, but it is to 
be regretted that their victory was darkened by some dastardly 
acts. 

Their success had caused a lull, which prepared the way for- 
tunately for Greene to assume the command of the southern 
department before the year closed. 

Further south, the success of Galvez in the autumn of 1779, 
on the Mississippi, had been followed by the Spanish attack 
on Mobile in the following March. Reinforcements joining 
him from Havana, Galvez left New Orleans with about two 
thousand men, and on the 15th took Fort Charlotte on the 
Mobile River in season to defy Campbell, who came to succor 
it. The Spanish rule was thereby extended from the Pearl to 
the Perdido River. 

Meanwhile, Oliver Pollock, in New Orleans, was doing his 
best to send powder and supplies to Todd and Clark. He 
foiuid difficulty, however, in negotiating the paper sent liim by 
Clark because of the scarcity of specie. He obtained temporary 
relief from the private fortune of a Spanish official, and from 
the generous acceptance of Virginian bills by one Daniel Clark, 
an American whose claim on that State long remained unsettled. 
All the while trying to keep up the credit of continental bills. 
Pollock was daily diminishing his available cash to the extent 
of nearly nine thousand dollars in the aggregate. The depre- 
ciation of these bills was, on the whole, much less in the Great 
Valley than on the Atlantic coast. 

There had Ijeen throughout the year two problems deeply 
affecting this trans-Alleghany region, which had closely engaged 
the attention of Congress. 



182 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

With a population in tlie States rising three million, and 
likely to increase abnormally, there was no disposition among 
the representatives of the people either to accept the dictates of 
France and Spain south of the Ohio, or those of England 
towards the lakes. The question practically turned on the free 
navigation of the Mississippi as bounding the empire acquired 
by the treaty of 1763, and on the control of this western coun- 
try as a public domain supposed to be caj)able of meeting the 
cost of the war. 

Jay, who had been chosen minister to Spain (October 4), to 
enforce its claim to the Mississippi just at the time that Galvez 
was grasping the lower parts of that river, had found in Madrid 
great difficulties in his suits. Congress di'ew money-bills on 
him, hoping for his success with the Spanish ministry, but that 
government broadly intimated to him that their assistance 
woidd depend on obtaining exclusive control of the Mississippi. 
Ever since the Continental Congress had sought the recognition 
and aid of Spain, the Mississippi question, in one form or 
another, had been a perj)lexing problem. It was made all the 
more difficult through the combined Bourbon interests of Spain 
and France, and by the embarrassing disposition of a strong 
faction in Congress to sacrifice the future of the West by sur- 
rendering to Spain this control of the Mississippi. The purjiose 
of this faction was, as Richard Henry Lee said, nothing but a 
studied " depreciation of our back country." 

The Madrid cabinet insisted that the proclamation of 1763 
had divested the colonies of all territorial rights beyond the 
Alleghanies. To meet such pretensions, Jay, on his arrival in 
Spain, had instructed his secretary, who preceded him on the 
way to Madrid, " to remember to do justice " to the rights of 
Virginia to the western country. 

Jay soon discovered, upon confronting the minister himself, 
that it was the object of Spain to entrap the Americans into an 
alliance which woxdd have compelled them to continue the war 
"for objects which did not include ours." This sinister pur- 
pose dawning upon Jay's mind, he had resolved, so far as he 
had the power, to yield nothing. " France is determined," he 
wrote home, " to manage between Sjsain and America so as to 
make us debtors to French influence with Spain, and to make 
Spain obligated to their influence with us." 



GARDOQUI. 183 

As the negotiations with Gardoqui went on, it was suggested 
to Jay that matters between S})ain and the United States would 
go more smoothly if Jay would only offer the surrender of the 
Mississippi. Jay replied " that the Americans, almost to a man, 
believed that God Almighty had made that river a highway for 
the peoj^le of the upper country to go to the sea by ; that this 
country was extensive and feeble ; that the general, many offi- 
cers, and others of distinction and influence in America were 
deeply interested in it ; that it would rapidly settle ; and that 
the inhabitants would not be readily convinced of the justice of 
being obliged either to live without foreign commodities or lose 
the surplus of their productions ; or be obliged to transport 
both over rugged mountains and through an immense wilder- 
ness to and from the sea, when they daily saw a fine river flow- 
ing before their doors and offering to save them all that trouble 
and expense, and that without injury to Spain." 

Gardoqui replied that the present generation would not need 
the river, and that it might be left to future ones to manage 
their own affairs. When these complexities were reported to 
Franklin in Paris, he replied to Jay (October 2, 1780 ) : " Poor 
as we are, yet as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree 
with them to buy at a great price the whole of their rights 
in the Mississippi than sell a drop of the waters. A neighbor 
might as well ask me to sell my street door." Congress gave 
Jay all the sujjport he needed. " If," they wrote to him, " an 
express acknowledgment of our rights cannot be obtained from 
Spain, it is not by any stipulation on the part of America to be 
relinquished." 

The French minister at Pliiladelphia was meanwhile eagerly 
abetting the Bourbon interest in the same spirit. He repre- 
sented to Congress that the United States had no rights to 
territory westward from the settlements as they existed at the 
date of the proclamation of 17G3, and that the east bank of 
the Mississippi was British territory, open to Spanish inroads. 
The understanding between France and Spain was :i])parently 
complete, and, as the season wore on, Carmichael, Jay's secre- 
tary, became convinced that Spain was manoeuvring for delaj^s, 
trusting rather to prompt interposition at the general peace to 
attain her ends. 

Meanwhile, »Tohn Adams, Avho, in February, 1780, luid 



184 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

reached Paris, clothed with authority to treat for peace, was 
flattering Vergennes in May that " an alliance with France was 
an honor and a security which had been near his heart.' It 
was not many weeks, however, before this importunate Yankee 
was offending Vergennes by his self-aggression and want of 
tact. Fortunately, he saw behind the diplomacy of the wily 
Frenchman what Jay, released from his Spanish toils, later 
discerned, and what Franklin, in his belief that gratitude to 
France was both a duty and good policy, was loath to see. 

At Madrid, Jay's impulses and his instructions allowed him 
to go no farther than to promise the aid of America in estab- 
lishing Spanish hold on Florida, and before this, Mirales, the 
Spanish minister in Philadelphia, had been instructed to engage 
with Congress for a body of American troops to enter the 
Spanish service for that purpose. 

On October 4, 1780, Congress had further upheld Jay by 
new instructions, and Madison drew uj) the case of the United 
States. It was rej^orted to Congress on October 17, and was 
at once sent to Franklin and Jay. It represented that the 
Illinois and Wabash regions were nnder American jurisdiction, 
and that the mouth of the Ohio and the course of the Missis- 
sippi down to 31° were controlled at Fort Jefferson. It was put 
to the credit of the United States, and not to that of Virginia, 
that this condition prevailed ; and Virginia, at the same time, 
proposed that the Mississippi below 31° should be guaranteed 
to Spain, if Spain would guarantee " to the United States " all 
above that parallel. 

The Americans were making rather than confirming principles 
in international law. Claims to the free navigation of a river 
whose mouth was held by an alien were not then to be settled 
by any well-established conclusions in which all nations agreed. 
The freedom of the Ehine had been determined by the Treaty 
of Westphalia in 1G48 ; but that of the Scheldt was yet to be 
left imsettled by the Peace of Fontainebleau in 1785. 

This action of Congress in October was hardly done when 
the ill success of Gates in the south and the sense of insecurity 
which Arnold's treason had caused produced one of those 
revulsions to which strenuous times are liable, and in Novem- 
ber, 1780, there were signs that Congress, on the urgency of 
South Carolina and Georgia, was weakening its position. It 



VIRGINIA AND THE NORTHWEST. 185 

was known that, on the one hand, England was endeavoring 
to disjoin Spain from the French alliance, and, on the other, 
it was an every-day occurrence that Luzerne, in Philadelphia, 
was bringing to bear all the pressure he could to effect the pur- 
pose of France and the interests of Spain. With this turn of 
affairs, Congress approached the end of 1780 with not a little 
unrest from sectional discord. Virginia was admonishing New 
England that if she weakened on the Mississippi question, she 
might rue it when the question of the fisheries was to be settled. 

In respect to the other problem, the year (1780) had opened 
with an encouraging outlook. New York had stepped forward 
with a proposition to cede to the States the claim which she 
professed to have acquired (1701, 1726) from the Iroquois to 
the western lands. She argued that the grant to the Duke of 
York had barred the claims of the New England colonies, while 
that of Virginia was estopped by the rescinding of her charter 
and the grant to Penn, wdiich preventions gave precedence to 
the Indian claim which she advanced. It was in fact the least 
valid of any of the claims, but was good enough to give away 
as a precedent. On February 19, the New York Assembly 
authorized her delegates to make either an unreserved or a 
limited cession. The act was read in Congress on March 7. 
Six weeks later, that State authorized Congress to restrict her 
western limits. 

These actions had their effect in Virginia. Late in June, 
Joseph Jones wrote to Jefferson : " Coukl Virginia but think 
herself, as she certainly is, full large enough for vigorous gov- 
ernment, she, too, would moderate her desires, and cede to the 
United States, on certain conditions, her territory beyond the 
Ohio." George Mason, in July, fornudated the Virginia propo- 
sitions. These were to give up the country between the west 
bounds of Pennsylvania and the Ohio, north of Mason and 
Dixon's line (being the region since known as the Panhandle), if 
Congress guaranteed to Virginia her remaining territory, which 
he claimed to be bounded by the north bank of the Ohio on one 
side, and by the North Carolina line (3G° 30') on the other. 
This cession of the territory north of the Ohio was contingent 
upon seven conditions : First, that the territory should eventu- 
ally be made into not less than two States. Second, that Vir- 



186 A YEAR OF SUSPENSE. 

ginia should be reimbursed for Clark's expedition and all other 
attending expenses. Third, that the French settlers should be 
protected in their titles, and defended against incursions from 
Detroit. Fourth, that one hundred and fifty thousand acres 
should be reserved as bounty lands for Clark's soldiers. Fifth, 
that the cession at the falls made to Clark by the Wabash In- 
dians should be confirmed to him. Sixth, in case Virginia did 
not have land enough south of the Ohio to make good her mili- 
tary bounties, that she should have it on the north. Seventh, 
that all the territory not thus reserved should be held in com- 
mon by all the States, and that all individual purchases of land 
should be void. 

An impulse to hasten the completion of the confederation 
was palpably growing, and, on September 6, Congress urged 
the States claiming a western extension to " remove the only 
obstacle to a final ratification of the articles of confederation," 
and make a united cession of these disputed territories. Con- 
gress had been brought to this, not only by the New York act 
of February 19, but by consideration of counter representa- 
tions made by Virginia and Maryland. A few days later (Sep- 
tember 12), Madison felt sure that the crisis had i)assed. In 
October, there were new hopes for a while. Connecticut offered 
to cede her charter claims beyond the mountains, provided she 
could retain jurisdiction. Congress, with the otherwise encour- 
aging prospect, was not disposed to hamper the transfer, and 
declined to meet the conditions. On the same day. Congress 
ordered that all ceded lands should be held for the comnu)n 
benefit of all the States, — the initial legislation for a public 
domain, — but at the same time recognized the rights of the 
States to be reimbursed for the cost of maintaining their claims. 
It was further agreed that these lands should be divided into 
repul)liean States and become candidates for admission to the 
confederation. 

The year closed with Tom Paine in his Public Good attack- 
ing (December 30) the Virginia pretensions to their charter 
rights. He dwelt on the vague definition of the charter of , 
1609, as admitting no such precision of bounds as Virginia 
claimed, and in the belief which at that time prevailed of the 
narrowness of the continent, no such imperial range of l)Ounds 
could have been contemplated. Contemporary newspapers 



i 



RESULTS IN 1780. 187 

allege that Paine's sense of justice was based on promise from 
the Indiana Company of twelve thousand acres of this same 
land, though Conway, his latest biographer, disputes the state- 
ment. 

Paine outlined a plan of setting up a new State of nearly the 
same limits as the present Kentucky ; and by the sales of its 
territory he expected to replenish the national treasury. Ham- 
ilton was one of the few who did not expect much aid to the 
treasury in this way. " Back lands," he says, " are a very good 
resource in reserve ; but I suspect they will not have so much 
present financial efficacy as to be useful to procure credit."' 

So, upon the whole, the year 1780 closed in the west with 
good omens, if with checkered results in actual accomplish- 
ment. 



CHAPTER XI. 

EAST AND WEST. 
1781. 

The year 1781 was practically the last year of the war on 
the Atlantic slope. Greene had shown the highest ability in 
the sonth in snatching the fruits of victory from defeat, and 
Cornwallis had been entrapped at Yorktown. The year had 
opened sadly in the revolt of the Pennsylvania line, and the 
depreciation of the continental ])aper had gone on, so that by 
midsunnner the bills were in effect valueless. Scarce a sixth 
of the taxes could be collected ; and the confederation, after it 
was perfected, seemed but a mockery of " the firm and per- 
petual league of friendship " which it professed to be. No one 
felt its futility more than Washington, and he had complained 
to his personal friends, " I see one head gradually changing 
into thirteen. I see one army branching into thirteen." Yet 
with all this, there came the flash at Yorktown, and the year 
closed along the seaboard with hope. 

Beyond the mountains there had been, during the year, the 
old iteration of cross movements, with no real gain to either 
combatant ; but in Congress a first step, as will be later shown, 
had been taken in oiviuo- a continental control to the " crown 
lands " reserved in the proclamation of 1763. While these 
cession movements ])ade fair to solve the problem of the con- 
federation's asserted extension to the Mississippi, and to estab- 
lish a ground for a boundary at the peace, the Spanish claim to 
that river was still a source of anxiety. On the same day on 
which Virginia had proposed an inadmissible cession (January 
2), Congress, as we shall see, had instructed Jay to yield the 
Mississippi to Spain, rather than lose her alliance. Likewise 
on the same day (January 2), an expedition left St. Louis to 
plant the Spanish flag within the disputed territory. Under the 
lead of Captain Pourre (or Pierro), a force of sixty militia and 



GALVEZ IN FLORIDA. 189 

sixty Indians marched two hundred leagues across the Illinois 
region, and fell upon an English post at St. Joseph (near the 
modern Niles in Michigan), captured it, secured prisoners, and 
then quickly retreated, and were back in St. Louis in March. 
Both Franklin and Jay, when they heard of it, were prepared 
to believe that Spain had attempted the incursion merely to 
establish a claim to be advanced at the peace when, under pos- 
sible diplomatic complications, a mere dash across the country 
might count against the steady hold which Clark had fixed 
upon the Illinois. 

Before Pourre had returned to St. Louis, Galvez, on February 
28, started with a fleet, conveying fourteen hundred men, to in- 
vade Florida. He appeared before Pensacola and, despite some 
defection in his naval auxiliaries, he pushed his transports, 
under fire, past the English fort into the inner bay. The ad- 
miral was chagrined, and followed in Galvez's w^ake. The fort 
beat off the fleet, and Galvez brought up his land forces and 
opened trenches. A breach was made in the walls by the ex- 
plosion of a magazine, and while storming parties were oi-ganiz- 
ing, the British, on May 9, hoisted the white flag. Thus all of 
west Florida fell into Spanish hands, and Spain had secured 
a coveted foothold on the flank of the Southern States. Eight 
hundred troops, with which Campbell, under Germain's orders, 
had expected to secure the lower Mississippi, were sent pris- 
oners to New York under parole, but to the discontent later of 
the Spanish government. During the absence of Galvez, and 
on the rumor of his defeat and of a British fleet being in the 
Gulf, the British settlers and the loyalists, including the Con- 
necticut colony, living about Natchez, rose (April 22) upon 
the Spaniards and by a ruse overawed them. Colonel Hutch- 
ins once more (April 29) spread the British flag upon Fort 
Panmure, while the Spanish garrison marched to Baton Rouge. 
Upon Galvez's triumphant return, the insurgents were in dan- 
ger of his resentment, and fled across the country to Savannah, 
making a painful march of one hundred and thirty-one days. 
Some of them fell into the hands of the hovering bands of 
patriots, and the rest reached that town in October. It is a 
story of prolonged misery which Pickett has told in liis Ala- 
haina. 



1 



190 EAST AND WEST. 

While Spain was thus successful at the south and had, by a 
dash at St. Joseph, attempted to give effect to her diplomatic 
pretensions in the northwest, the real struggle as to the future 
ownership of the great stretch of country between the Allegha- 
nies and the Mississippi was to drag on for another year along 
the Ohio and on its affluents. 

It was still in the autumn of 1780, and at the close of the 
active campaigning of that year, the dream of Jefferson to make 
at last an effective demonstration against Detroit, by which 
Virginia would be relieved of maintaining five hundred or a 
thousand men in the western wilds to protect her frontiers and 
outlying settlements. Jefferson had api^ealed to Washington 
to give the movement continental sanction, and to furnish the 
munitions and supplies, while Virginia called on her militia. 

To give and to take counsel in the initiatory steps, Clark had 
come over the mountains, and was representing in Richmond 
that the government must be prepared to confront the coming 
season something like two thousand British and Indians in the 
western country. The problem was how to anticipate the as- 
saults of such a body and carry the war into the enemy's coun- 
try. When Jefferson, in September, 1780, had been sending 
prisoners from Kichmond to New York for exchange, he had 
not given up Hamilton, for fear of the active energies that 
officer might impart at Detroit if he should rejoin his old com- 
mand. Clark's futile attempts to reach Detroit had already 
cost Virginia something like half a million pounds of the cur- 
rent money, and it was com]iuted that another three hundred 
thousand must be added to that, if the present expedition should 
succeed. Jefferson hoped, as we have said, that this pecuniaiy 
aid would come from the Continent, while Virginia supplied 
the men. He sent ovit orders for the frontier militia to gather 
at Pittsburg, on March 1, 1781, but he imparted to the count- 
officers no definite plan for the campaign. There was, how- 
ever, no misunderstanding as to the purpose between Clark and 
the governor, and Clark was in his daily councils. 

Steuben was during the winter trying to impede the raids 
of Benedict Arnold along the James River, and Clark, still at 
the east, entered into these defensive movements with alacrity,, 
leaving Jefferson, meanwhile, to direct the preparations which 
were going on at Fort Pitt. Late in December, 1780, Jeffer- 



CLARK'S NEW PLANS. 191 

son drew up Clark's instructions, charging him not only with 
the capture of Detroit, but with securing control of Lake Erie. 
lie promised him two thousand men, and assured him that 
ammunition and packhorses would be at the falls of the Ohio 
by March 15. If preparations were then completed, Clark 
would be able to take advantage of the early break of the ice in 
the Wabash, and reach Lake Erie before the enemy could move 
their forces across it. Washington, in reply to Jefferson's a])- 
peals, was at the same time dispatching orders (December 28, 
1780) to Brodhead, commanding at Fort Pitt, to furnish all 
the troops he could, including an artillery company, and to 
avoid raisiug questions of rank with Clark. Jefferson had asked 
Washington to give Clark a continental commission, to prevent 
any question of rank, but Washington had declined because 
Clark was on strictly state service. In January, 1781, Clark, 
lingering still at Richmond, was made a brigadier-general of the 
Virginia forces, " to be embodied in an expedition westward of 
the Ohio." They Avere destined for a canq^aign which was 
to be rendered unusually active by a widespread uprising of the 
Indians in the British interests. At least, so felt Slaughter, 
who held the falls in Clark's absence, and who was disturbed by 
the rumors which reached him. Stories of this kind induced 
Jefferson, On flamiary 13, to ask Steuben to release Clark from 
his engagements on the seaboard, in order that he might pro- 
ceed immediately to the western country. Thus withdrawn 
from further participation in the movements on the James, 
Clark, who proceeded to Pittsburg, found little to encourage 
him. 

Weeks went on, and there seemed to be little chance of Clark's 
securing the two thousand men which Jefferson had promised, 
though, on February 13, the governor had informed him that 
Steuben had consented to Gibson's acting as his lieutenant 
and taking his regiment with him to the west. Continual 
alarms in Kentucky and the invasion of tide-water Virginia 
were keeping the fighting men at home, and Jefferson, finding 
the militia loath to march from their settlements, had called 
(February 16) upon some of the county lieutenants to urge 
volunteers to rally around Clai'k. 

Washington had sent Clark little aid, and it may be doubted 
if the conunander-in-chief felt nmch confidence in a hazardous 



192 EAST AND WEST. 

movement of militia, liable to scatter at any sudden rumor of 
an Indian raid upon their homes. We find Clark in March, 
1781, complaining to Washington that Brodhead, who had de- 
clined to detach Gibson's regiment, kept men from his ranks, 
but the commanding general could well make allowance for the 
environments of danger at Fort Pitt, where Brodhead hardly 
knew whom to trust. He had, however, more than once (Feb- 
ruary 25 ; March 27) assured Washington that Clark should 
have his best support, while he accounted to the commanding- 
general for the apathy of the militia by saying that " they are 
availing themselves of the unsettled jurisdiction." Brodhead's 
condition was indeed 'desperate. He could get no supplies, and 
there was every indication of his being very shortly enveloped 
by hostile savages. 

Late in the winter (February, 1781) it was known that the 
Delawares outside the Moravian influence were moving west- 
ward along Lake Erie, professedly in search of game ; but it 
soon became certain that they were putting themselves within 
the range of British influence. When the spring fairly opened 
and the Cherokees were making hostile demonstration in the 
southwest, it was only too apparent that the Americans had 
hardly a friend among the warring tribes of the Ohio valley. 
With this condition of things, Brodhead, on April 7, led, with 
something of desperation, one hundred and fifty regulars from 
Fort Pitt against the recusant Delawares. At Wheeling his 
little force was strengthened by about as many militia under 
Colonel David Shepherd. Brodhead crossed the Ohio, fell upon 
the Lidian town at Coshocton, laid it waste, destroyed the cat- 
tle and stores, and returned with his plunder. He had by this 
movement pushed the Delawares back from the Muskingum 
and Tuscarawas, and forced them to the Scioto and Sandusky, 
and the}^ never returned. Some Christian Delawares, whom he 
had encountered at the Moravian stations, followed him back to 
Fort Pitt. Brodhead's success was in part owing to the misap- 
prehension which Simon Girty, now by De Peyster's orders 
among the Wyandots, had of Brodhead's strength. While the 
American expedition was pursuing its devastating march, Girty 
supposed that it comprised at least a thousand men, and that 
Clark had already started down the Ohio with as many more. 
It was this false information that held the Wyandots back. 



CLARK'S INSTRUCTIONS. . 193 

That Clark's enlistments suffered from these movements by 
Brodhead was clear ; and the failure of Washington to send 
him recruits, as well as the uncertain jurisdiction of Pennsylva- 
nia and Virginia, rendered it very doubtful if he could move 
down the river by the middle of June, as he hoped to do. More 
than once in May (21st and 26th), Clark appealed to Wash- 
ington, "It has been the influence of our post on the Illinois 
and Wabash," he says, " that has saved the frontiers, and in a 
great measure baffled the designs of the enemy at Detroit. If 
they get possession of them, they will be able to command three 
times the number of valuable warriors they" do at present." 

The difficulty between Brodhead and Gibson was ripening. 
The latter officer, prevented by Brodhead from aiding Clark, 
was restless under the deprivation, and Clark intimated to 
Washington that positive orders from him would give Gibson 
the release he longed for. 

The exact scope of Jefferson's instructions to Clark had not 
yet been divulged, and wliat Clark let fall favored the belief 
that his purpose was in reality to succor the exposed Kentucky 
settlements. 

This pretense of Clark was evidently accepted by Haldimand, 
when he heard of it, as his true intent, for as early as May that 
general was sending word to Sinclair and De Peyster that the 
Americans would not enter Canada, and they must be attacked 
along their frontiers. He advised De Peyster to cease pamper- 
ing the Sandusky Indians, and to keep them busy in breaking 
u}) American settlements north of the Ohio. 

It was thus while the British were thinking themselves safe 
from assault north of the lakes, and intent on making their 
Indians wage a vicarious warfare, that Clark, near the close of 
July, 1781, embarking a force of only four hundred, out of the 
two thousand promised to him, and carrying three fieldpieces, 
began to move down the river from Pittsburg. On reaching 
Wheeling, he wrote to the governor — no longer Jefferson, who 
had resigned on June 1 — that he had " relinqiiished all expec- 
tations. I have been at so much pains," he says, " that the dis- 
appointment is doul)ly mortifying." His only hope was that 
he should learn that Detroit liad not been reinforced, which 
might yet encourage him to attempt its capture. As he went 
on, his force alternately diminished and grew by desertions and 



194 EAST AND WEST. 

additions, and it bore a rather heterogeneous aspect when, on 
September 1, he reached Fort Nelson at the falls. De Pey- 
ster, at Detroit, better informed at last than Girty, had rather 
tardily sent down to the Ohio a force of a hundred rangers 
under Captain Andrew Thompson, and three hundred Indians 
under McKee, to watch for a favorable moment to waylay Clark. 
Joseph Brant and George Girty — the latter formerly one of 
Willing's marauders — were, fortunately for De Peyster, already 
astir. On August 24, at a jjoint eleven miles below the Great 
Miami, they fell upon a flotilla of mounted Pennsylvania volun- 
teers, one hundred and seven in number, under Colonel Archi- 
bald Lochry (Loughrey), following in the wake of Clark, and 
seeking to overtake him. A letter to Clark, sent forward by 
this lieutenant, had been intercepted and revealed the situation. 
Clark had not reached the falls when every man of this force 
was either killed or captured. They had landed to cook their 
breakfast and feed their horses, when they were suddenly at- 
tacked from both sides of the river. A third of them were 
killed, and the rest surrendered ; but the colonel and others, 
unable to march, were later murdered. 

Three days afterward, the victors, moving up the Great Miami, 
met McKee coming laggardly down from Detroit. The com- 
bined bodies were not deemed to be sufficient to assail Clark, 
now in his stockade at the falls, as they had learned on Septem- 
ber 9, when within thii^ty miles of that point. 

The enemy soon broke up, and a part, some two hundred in 
number, bent on mischief, were led by McKee and Brant to- 
wards the Kentucky settlements. Meanwhile Clark, fearing 
attack, lay inactive at the falls. About the same time, a Chero- 
kee chief, aided by some of these raiders, threatened the 
Cumberland settlements ; but Robertson effectually repulsed 
the assailants, and gained prestige enough to hold, for a time 
at least, his neighbors, the Choctaws and Chickasaws, in the 
interests of his people. 

As the summer advanced, the northern Indians gathered for an 
attack on Wheeling. Zeisberger, the Moravian, who had learned 
of the savage purpose, sent (August 18) warning messages, so 
that the attack when it came was expected, and the garrison of 
Fort Henry was prepared. The enemy were baffled, and with- 



BRODHEAD AND GIBSON: 195 

drew, but not till they had taken some prisoners, and from one 
of them they had learned that the Moravians had forewarned 
the garrison. The result was hardly to be avoided. The Mo- 
ravians had proved spies and tale-bearers, while claiming immu- 
nity as neutrals, and, if the evidence is to be believed, they had 
been tortuous in their replies when accused of it. Gnadenhiitten, 
their settlement on the Tuscarawas, was therefore broken up 
by a party of Indians, Tories, and French partisans, under Mat- 
thew Elliot, who drove the missionaries and their Delaware 
neophytes to Sandusky first, and later to Detroit (October 25), 
where they could do less mischief. 

Brodhead, who had been complaining (August 29) to Wash- 
ington of the dissensions in his camp, owing to a divided head- 
ship between himself and Gibson, could have had little regret 
when, on September 17, he withdrew from Fort Pitt, leaving 
Gibson in command. Neither this new commander, nor Clark 
at the falls, had any longer a hope of reaching Detroit. Brod- 
head had been withdrawn by order of Washington, who at the 
moment of the change was closing about Cornwallis and York- 
town. The brilliant outcome in October of this movement in 
the Virginia peninsula gave Washington for a time little oppor- 
tunity to think of the situation on the Ohio, and of the barren 
issues there of the year's campaign. 

But neither Clark's abortive aims at Detroit, nor Greene's 
defeats in Carolina, were without results that told in the end. 
Greene could say of Eutaw (September 8) that it was " the 
most obstinate fight he ever saw," and that " victory was his." 
Notwithstanding the distresses of the campaign, Greene had 
rendered Yorktown possible. Clark had still a stronger hold, 
feeble as it was, on the northwest than De Peyster had. He 
had some seven hundred and fifty men at the falls, fed on rot- 
ten buffalo meat, and the savages surrounded him, and far and 
near the settlers were forted, but, as Haldimand acknowledged, 
Clark had still kept the British on the defensive between the 
Ohio and tlie lakes, a condition which occasional raids of the 
savages did not relieve. Haldimand charges it upon the capri- 
cious conduct of the Indian allies of the British that Clark's 
fate had not been decided, and the terror of Clark's name 
had done much to create that capriciousness. That Clark had 



196 EAST AND WEST. 

escaped the expected fate determined, as it turned out, the 
future territorial allegiance of the great northwest. 

Cold weather settled down in November with Haldimand still 
ignorant of the fate of Cornwallis, and looking forward to 
another sea-son of hostilities on the Ohio. Now that Yorktowu 
had determined so much on the seaboard, Congress, which re- 
ceived an official notice of that victory on October 24, was 
within a month, as Livingston informed Franklin (November 
26), preparing for an active campaign for the next season. 
When Franklin heard the great news from the Virginia penin- 
sula, he wrote from Paris to John Adams : " The infant Hercules 
in his cradle has now strangled his second serpent," referring 
to the news from Saratoga which sealed the French alliance 
four years before. 

Washington, scanning the future, saw the necessity of forc- 
ing decisive results beyond the mountains in the next cam- 
paign, and for this object General William Irvine was sent to 
take command at Fort Pitt. One of the earliest reports which 
Irvine made to Washington was that Lochry's neighbors of 
Westmoreland County, in Virginia, were disheartened at the 
havoc which that officer's defeat had made among the flower of 
their young men. They were accordingly seriovisly thinking of 
abandoning their county in the spring. On the other hand, 
the fact that the indecisive campaign of the last season in that 
region had not deprived the Americans of any territory had 
already, as Irvine reported (December 3), instigated " people 
of different places to concoct plans to emigrate into the Indian 
country, there to establish a government for themselves." This 
impvdse was in large measure owing to the continued uncer- 
tainty of the limits of the jurisdiction of Pennsylvania and 
Virginia. An agreement had been reached in the preceding 
April by which the five degrees from the Delaware should be 
determined on the southern boundary line of Pennsylvania. 
There had, however, been delays in running the bounds, so that 
the weary settlers were threatening to migrate beyond the dis- 
puted territory, and Irvine was reporting to Washington, in De- 
cember, that until the lines were drawn the militia were useless. 
There was also, doubtless, an adventurous spirit and some am- 
bitious projects interwoven with these restless motives. It was 



PENNS YL VA NIA B UNDS. 



197 



owing, perhaps, to the stringent acts which Pennsylvania passed 
against such an exodus that the Virginians in greater numbers 
than the Pennsylvanians were joining in the removals. The 
line which was expected to set at rest these disturbances was 
not in fact actually run in a provisional way till November of 
the next year (1782), and it was not confirmed till three years 
later (1785). 

Irvine felt that while the present time demanded, first of all, 
militar}^ success, it was not wise to inaugurate such remote 




PENNSYLVANIA AND VIRGINIA BOUNDARY DISPUTE. 

Note. —This cut is from N. B. Craig's Olden Time, Pittsburg, 1S4C, vol. i. p. 449. 

Key : is the finally established Pennsylvania line (curved and straight) is tlie 

line claimed by Pennsylvania. is tlie line proposed by Dunmore. — o — o — o is tlie 

line proposed by Virginia to be continued nortli by the curved line. 

autonomies. He was doubtful if even the established Kentucky 
settlements, or such posts as Fort Mcintosh, could be sustained 
till more peaceful times came. His purpose was to prepare the 
immediate frontiers against savage raids, and then to devote all 
available resources to following up the Indians to their destruc- 
tion, and to waste no time in merely burning their towns. He 
planned in the end to make, if he could, a sudden attack upon 



198 EAST AND WEST. 

Detroit. He liad uo purpose to hold the straits, if he got pos- 
session of them, for the distance to Detroit was too great to 
transport supplies, and the British would still command the 
lakes. He expected only to make a dash and do as much damage 
as he could, and then retire, hoping in this way to imj^ress the 
Indians and acquire a temporary respite till the final influence 
of Yorktown towards a peace was made .clear. Washington, 
in his correspondence with Irvine, recognized the necessity and 
expediency of the movement, but nothing could well come of 
the i3rojeet during the winter. 

The tenacity with which, under all his disappointments, Clark 
had maintained his grasp on the northwest during 1781, made 
that year such a turning-point in the struggle with the mother 
country beyond the mountains as Yorktown had proved to be 
on the Atlantic slope. Not less important was the firm step 
forward which the States had made in the same interval in 
determining their political relations to this western country. 
Just one year from the time when New York had indicated a 
scheme of compromise, Virginia had retreated from her first 
pretensions so far as to offer (January 2, 1781) a cession of 
jurisdiction over the country north of the Ohio, if Congress 
would agree to certain conditions. To one of these, that the 
region should ultimately be partitioned into States, there could 
be no objection. Nor was it unreasonable to require Congress 
to reimburse her for defending this same region from the as- 
saults from Detroit, for there was then imsettled on her hands 
the just claim of Oliver Pollock for a very large sum which he 
had advanced to Clark in his necessities. Congress knew well 
enough its own indebtedness to the same ardent patriot, who 
had beggared himself in the cause, and had parted with all 
his property in New Oi'leans at a sacrifice, in his efforts to 
repay the money which he had borrowed from the chest of 
the Spanish king. Congress, as well as Virginia, had caused 
Pollock's embarrassment, and it might well meet the obligations 
of both. It was furthermore no unexpected stipulation that 
the French Canadians inhabiting this region, and who had so 
readily changed their allegiance, should be protected in their 
landed rights ; that all bounty lands which had been promised 
to the soldiers should be respected. It was no hardship for 



THE CONFEDERATION FORMED. 199 

Congress to agree that all royal grants in that country should 
be held to be void. But when, by implication, Virginia asked 
that the claims of New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, 
and that all claimants under native grants, both those of indi- 
viduals and of the Indiana Company, should be disregarded, 
and that the Kentucky country should be guaranteed to her, she 
arrogantly asked more than Congress could possibly concede. 
To take these and all other propositions, from whatever source, 
into consideration. Congress on January 31, 1781, instituted a 
committee, who proceeded to call upon all the claimant States 
and grantees to make a showino- of their riohts. 

New York moved promptly, and directed her delegates to 
execute a deed to Congress of the territory west of a self-im- 
posed boundary following the meridian of the western end of 
Lake Ontario, but requiring a guarantee of her territory east 
of that line if Virginia secured such a pledge. This deed was 
executed on March 1, and Maryland, having authorized her 
delegates in anticipation, on the same day signed the articles of 
confederation, in the belief that the crisis was ]3assed. The 
next day Congress began to head its bills, " The United States 
in Congress assembled." 

Matters rested till October, when, just as the toils were tight- 
ened about Cornwallis, and a committee of Congress stood 
ready to hear Virginia and her rivals formulate their respective 
claims, that State stood aloof (October 16) and contended that 
any presentation of her position was not consistent with her 
dignity, and ten days later she vainly tried to embarrass the 
committee and limit its powers. 

On November 3, the committee made its report. They rep- 
resented that they had not obtained from Virginia the same 
assistance which had been furnished them by the rival claim- 
ants. The committee, as was expected, made the most of tKe 
opportunity to aggrandize the Iroquois claim of New York, 
both north and south of the Ohio, and to belittle that of Vir- 
ginia. They attempted to show this depreciation by setting the 
rights of the Iroquois, the grants which the traders of the Indi- 
ana Company had received, and the limits fixed by the procla- 
mation of 1763, against the charter rights of 1609. It was 
farther claimed that the crown lands as George the Third had 
defined them had fallen natui-ally to the revolting colonies as 



200 EAST AND WEST. 

a whole. The grant to the VanJalia Company, though legally 
instituted, was held to be too large for public policy, while it 
might be expedient to make some compensation to the propri- 
etors in the final settlement ; but that the assumed holding of 
the Illinois and Wabash Company had no warrant in law what- 
ever. The committee closed with urging Virginia to make an 
unrestricted cession. Madison, who was fearful that Virginia 
would take deep umbrage at the report, still hoped that the 
seven States necessary to act on the committee's report would 
save Virginia from such huuiiliation, and indeed the report as 
a whole was never acted upon, since it was seen that the cession 
movement could get on better without such friction. And here 
the matter rested at the close of 1781. 

We have seen that, beneath the lowering skies of the open- 
ing of the year (1781), Congress had taken the initiative and 
Virginia, notwithstanding her recent reproach to New Eng- 
land, had abandoned her demand for the free navigation of 
the Mississippi in order better to gain the adherence of Spain. 
Jefferson sent instructions to that effect to the Virginia dele- 
gates on January 18. Some weeks later, Virginia moved in 
Congress that the river below 31° be yielded to Spain, if she 
would guarantee the free navigation to the United States above 
that point. On February 15, Congress, supine and in despair, 
instructed Jay to yield, if it was found necessary to the securing 
of a Spanish alliance. As the weeks went on, there was a prac- 
tical abandonment of all beyond the mountains, except so far 
as France might dictate the retention. Congress was even 
ready, pending an acknowledgment of independence, to agree to 
a truce with England, if France and Spain would deny that gov- 
ernment the occupation of all it had claimed. The degradation 
was complete when, on June 11, to Luzerne's delight, nine States, 
which were mainly those occupied by the enemy, forced through 
Congress a vote, leaving absolutely to France the definitions of 
the American bounds. Luzerne felt so sure of his victory that 
he informed his government that Congress would be content 
with the Ohio, if not with the Alleghanies, as a frontier. The 
surrender to France once made, all sorts of notions prevailed as 
to what could be saved of the western country. It was hoped, 
by yielding the Fort Stanwix grant of 1769 beyond the Kana- 



JAY IN MADRID. 201 

wha, — requiring at the same time the destruction of all neigh- 
boring fortified posts, — to satisfy France ; but if more was 
demanded, they hoped to appease the Franco-Spanish avidity 
by yielding, " for the use of the Indians," Niagara and western 
New York, and all the western slope of the Alleghanies, except 
so far as the charter of Pennsylvania covered the territory about 
the forks of the Ohio. These altei*native schemes are outlined 
in a paper by Gouverneur Morris, preserved in the Sparks man- 
uscripts. Virginia at one time (June 8) tried in vain to get 
a vote in which the western bounds were defined as leaving the 
St. Lawrence where the 45th parallel struck that river, and then 
proceeding by the lake to the Miami (Maumee), and so to the 
soui'ces of the Illinois, and down that river to the Mississii)pi, 
but not another State had the courage to insist upon it and 
save the conquest of Clark. 

While everything was fluttering to the death in Philadelphia, 
the soul of Jay in Madrid was rasped almost beyond endur- 
ance. He knew the ministry to be " insincere and mysterious," 
and it is pretty well proved, as he then feared, that his letters 
were opened in the Sjianish ])ost-office. He was conscious that 
those to whom he was granting diplomatic courtesies knew 
more of what Congress had done than was permitted him to 
know. He got intimations from Gouverneur Morris that led 
him to conjecture the truth. 

Finally, however, he obtained his luckless instructions, and 
on July 13 delivered them formally to Florida Blanca. He 
could now, at least, talk with him for the future upon terms 
more equal. 

By August, Congress had received Jay's response. Joseph 
Jones gives us his version of Jay's chagrin : " The Dons are 
l)laying a game wholly for themselves." 

When Congress awoke to this, with a spurt of valor, it voted 
August 10, unanimously, to yield nothing to Si)ain. l^efore 
this determination could have reached Jay, he sought to force a 
decision out of the laggard and tortuous S})anish ministers. On 
September 22, he made a formal proi)osition to relinipiish the 
navigation of the Mississippi below 31°, intimating the great- 
ness of the concession, inasmuch as it must retard the settle- 
ment of the country. He told tlie minister that the concession 
nuist be accepted immediately, for it could not be held to if 



202 EAST AND WEST. 

defeiTGcl to the general peace. He assumed this bold front with 
the same spirit with which he had tried to impress on Congress 
that their wavering was a mistake, and that any spirit was 
better than one " of humility and compliance." The bluster 
failed, and Jay was obliged to confess to Congress, when he 
next wrote (October 3), that Spain insisted on the entire con- 
trol of the Gulf of Mexico, and the exclusive navigation of the 
Mississippi. " The cession of the navigation of the Mississippi 
will, in my opinion," he added, "render a future war with 
Spain unavoidable." 

Before the president of Congress had received this, Oliver 
Pollock at New Orleans, with ample knowledge, was writing to 
the same official that the United States must insist on a port 
of deposit near the Houmas village, twenty-two leagues above 
New Orleans, where there was high land, and that they must 
claim a pilot stand at the Balize. 

Four days after Pollock wrote this, Cornwallis surrendered, 
and there was clearing; weather. 



CHAPTER XII. 

PEACE, 1782. 

The suiTender o£ Cornwallis ; the disjaosition of Parliament 
to peace ; Conway's successful motion (February 22) to dis- 
continue the war, which led North to exclaim, " We are beat 
completely ; " Burke's triumphant hopes, — all were recogniza- 
ble signs of the coming end of the dragging conflict. The 
British held a few ports on the seaboard, but by July they had 
evacuated Savannah. Such Atlantic footholds were not likely 
to interfere with America's securing an unbroken coast from 
Maine to Florida, though there was to be an attempt to make 
the country east of the Penobscot the price of the final surren- 
der of such ports. 

AVhile there was little opportunity for French machinations 
along the eastern slope of the Appalachians, it was otherwise 
beyond the mountains, and the progress of events in the great 
western valleys might in the coming months (1782) be of 
cardinal importance in settling the ultimate bounds of the 
Eepublic. 

Possessions in the northwest, as they stood, favored the per- 
manence of the American occupation, if there should be no 
great disaster during the coming season (1782). Ilaldimand, 
as commanding along the northern frontier, showed no disposi- 
tion to be active. Guy Johnson was eager to make a dash on 
Fort Pitt, and Roeheblave, now restored to the Canadian ser- 
vice, thought that a show of force on the Ohio might swerve 
the Kentuckians from their alleaiance to the confederated 
States ; but Ilaldimand gave little encouragement to any move- 
ments beyond a projected one of De Peyster to dislodge the 
American settlers about Chicago. 

Clarke still held his post at the falls, and was anxious to 
make it the rallying-place of patrol boats on the Ohio, but with 
a treasury of four shillings and " no means of getting more," 



204 PEACE, 1782. 

he could do little. The place, however, was already beginning 
to bustle with a transit trade. One Jacob Yoder, an adventur- 
ous trafficker, had brought in the spring some merchandise 
from the seaboard to the Monongahela, and from Old Redstone 
on that stream he had floated it down the river to the falls, in 
search of an ultimate market in New Orleans. 

There was a belief that by faithless acts, some Moravian 
Indians, who had returned to the Muskingum, had threatened 
the quiet of the river. So, with little hesitation, a party of 
Pennsylvanians, under David Williamson, had ruthlessly fallen 
upon them. It was a natural retribution when, in June, Colonel 
Crawford, under Irvine's orders, led a party against the Dela- 
wares on the Sandusky, and this unfortunate leader was captured 
and burnt at the stake. In August, a still harder blow was 
dealt by Captain Caldwell, with a party of British rangers and 
Indians, dispatched by De Peyster, when an attack was made 
on Bryant's Station, resulting, a day or two later, in a counter 
struaale of some mounted Kentuckians at the Blue Licks. 
This conflict proved to be one of the severest defeats which the 
frontiersmen ever sustained. A few weeks later, a force of 
British and Indians made an assault on Fort Henry (Wheeling). 
Colonel Zane and a feeble garrison happily sustained themselves 
till succor arrived. Before the season closed. Major Craig, 
sent from Fort Pitt, made a useless reconnoissance (November) 
towards Sandusky, while at the same time Clark, animated by 
revenge for the season's disasters, starting from the falls, led a 
thousand men against the Miamis, and devastated their towns. 
It was the last brilliant dash of a man who, amid the whirls of 
disappointment, was soon to surrender himself to evil habits, 
and drop out of memorable history. He had now made the 
final rude onset against British power in the northwest, as he 
had made the first four years before. 

Though Haldimand, on the British side, had, in the main, 
throushout the season counseled defensive measures, it had not 
been easy for him to prevent retaliatory strokes. Brant had 
hoped, while the year was closing, to give a finishing blow. 
Before the progress of the negotiations in Paris were known 
to presage peace, this savage chieftain had planned an attack 
on Foi^t Pitt, but learning of the excellent condition in which 
Irvine had put that post, he desisted. 



NEW YORK AND VERMONT. 205 

Thus it happened that negotiations for peace were going on 
in Paris while the fortunes of a desultory conflict were swaying 
hither and thither beyond the mountains. There was in the 
west, as in the east, no marked change in the position of the 
combatants as the season closed. 

It was, consequently, as we shall see, mainly the attitude of 
France and Spain touching this very western country, rather 
than the demands of England, which caused perplexity in the 
settlement of the boundaries of the new nation. Indeed, the 
good results of the final treaty we mainly owe to England, for 
by playing into the hands of our more bitter enemies, France 
and Spain, she could have seriously hampered the young lie- 
public at its birth. 

While the surgings of the war had not affected the relative 
possessions of the belligerents in the west, the relations of the 
States to that territory had, pending the negotiations for peace, 
been carried to an effective stage. Congress was brought in 
January (1782) squarely to affirm that the confederated States 
had succeeded to all the charter rights of the sea-to-sea colonies, 
as abridged by the Treaty of 17G3. Thus the ground was con- 
veniently cleared when, on May 1, 1782, Congress set itself to 
consider the committee's report of the preceding November 3. 

The main thing to be dealt with was the acceptance or refusal 
of the deed which had been offered by New York. Thei-e were 
reasons why Virginia kept a jealous and watchful eye upon her 
Northern rival. The Southern State saw danger in the press- 
ing Vermont question, for if that district was admitted to the 
Union, it meant, as New York claimed, that Congress could , 
decide between a State and a portion of the same State seeking 
autonomy. Such a result might prove a precedent, as Virginia 
saw, for Congress to partition that State's domain in accepting i 
Kentucky. The success of Vermont would bode furtlier ill to 
Virginia, in that the admission of that Northern State to the 
confederation would swell the vote of the non-claimant States, 
in considering the proposition of the committee to despoil Vir- 
ginia of her rights, by accepting the conflicting claims of her 
rival, New York. It was clear to Virginia that if Congress 
decided for New York, it threw the whole force of the confed- 
eration aa'ainst her. 



206 PEACE, 1782. 

The country was in something like a death struggle, and was 
impressed with a belief (however futile it proved to be) that a 
public domain at the west was going to fui"nish means to pay 
the expenses of the war. Under these circumstances, there was 
little chance that the rival claims of Virginia and New York 
would be dispassionately weighed, since measures in legislative 
bodies are not always, under the stress of war, pushed to just 
conclusions. 

The question of the relative value of these rival claims has 
not indeed proved easy of solution in later times. Bancroft 
holds all claims but Vii-ginia's to be invalid. The Supreme 
Court of the United States, in Johnson v. Mcintosh, while j^ro- 
nouncing against Indian titles as opposed to European pre- 
emption, may seem so far to have sustained the position of 
Virginia. But the historical question is complicated by the 
royal annulment of her charter in 1624, though the Virginia 
publicists have contended that further action in 1625 showed 
that the consequent possession by the crown of the original 
territorial limits did not deprive the colony of its rights of juris- 
diction ; nor was this again affected, as they further claimed, 
by the proclamation of 1763. In Congress, at least, at this time 
and later, the native grant was sustained, and pointedly, for the 
Indiana title, being a native one, was upheld, and the Vandalia 
title, being a royal preemption, was voided. 

We have seen that Thomas Paine had raised a new issue in 
giving a construction to the terms of the charter of 1609 which 
was opposed to that maintained by Virginia. The charter, it 
will be remembered, makes one of the lines running back from 
the coast proceed due west, while the other turns northwest, 
and both by a vague implication were supposed to strike the 
western ocean. Virginia's due west line was the North Caro- 
lina boundary, and the northwest one that which cut off the 
westei-n parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania and extended 
indefinitely towards Alaska, abridging thereby also the west- 
ern extension of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Paine's due 
west line struck back from the coast at the Maryland line, 
while his northwest line struck inland at the south till it joined 
the west line or entered the western sea. This water was 
held at that time (1609), as Paine contends, to be so near the 
Alleghanies and beyond their western slope that the two lines, 



NEW YORK CESSION. 207 

as he understood them, would probably touch the sea before 
they collided, and so warrant the expression of the charter, 
that they extended to that sea. Paine contended that this 
construction gave a more reasonable limit to the colony than 
the extent claimed by Virginia, which was large enough to 
embrace fifty colonies. It will be seen that this view disposed 
at once of the controversy so long and bitterly waged by Vir- 
ginia with Maryland and Pennsylvania, and affected the juris- 
diction of the upper Shenandoah. 

Congress, however, was clearly determined not to decide be- 
tween disputed interpretations, if a settlement could be reached 
by the voluntary cpiitclaims of the rival States. The mani- 
festations of the hour were easily colored by predilections. 
Madison fancied the Middle States, which had been opposed 
to Virginia by reason of the numbers of their citizens who 
were interested in land companies, were now drawing to the 
Virginia side. The Northern people said that Virginia was, on 
the contrary, losing ground, and even Madison, rather than con- 
tinue the contest, at last felt disposed to yield everything that 
would not benefit the arrogant land companies. The purpose 
of these he thought might be thwarted by setting Kentucky up 
as a new government. Indeed, if Irvine's observations were 
correct, there had grown during the summer, beyond the movm- 
tains, a strong disposition for more than one such separate 
government. 

The question of the acceptance of the New York deed came 
up in Congress a month before the peace commissioners in Paris 
had closed their labors, and Virginia stood alone in casting her 
vote against it. After a struggle of six years, the policy to 
which the constancy of Maryland had contributed, but which 
Congress had more wisely shaped, was now established. The 
New York deed, based on the various treaties with the Iroquois 
in 1684, 1701, 1726, 1744, and 1754, as the committee's reixu-t 
of August 16, 1782, enumerated them, conceded to Congress 
the fee in the territory between the lakes and the Cumberland 
Mountains, with a stretch westward, and all under a title which 
Madison styled " flimsy." He charged New York with urging 
her jurisdiction, not so much to maintain it, as to secure some 
credit for her cession of it. The true Virginian plea was that 
tlie Iroquois, while they could confer the right of occupancy, 



208 PEACE, 1783. 

could give no title against the prior discovery of other Chris- 
tian people. If the New York title had validity, it really left 
to Virginia but a renniant of her supposed jurisdiction to be 
surrendered as indisputably hers. Congress had decided that 
to accept this New York claim was sufficient for the occasion, as 
setting an example to be followed by the other claimant States, 
and its action practically banded the confederation in that ob- 
ject. Unless Virginia was bound to stand for her rights, — and 
the event proved she was not, — and unless Connecticut and 
Massachusetts and the States south of Virginia were to assume 
a position equally perverse, — and the event proved they were 
not, — the question of a great public domain was thus oppor- 
tunely settled, a month before the provisional treaty of peace 
was signed at Paris, when Congress, on October 29, voted to 
accept in due form the deed offered by New York, 

While thus in two important ways the relation of the West 
to the new Republic had been settled on its own soil, we need 
now to turn to a consideration of the di})lomatic foil and fence 
at Paris, which were ended on November 30, 1782, in a provi- 
sional treaty of peace. 

This diplomatic struggle had resulted in a distinct American 
triumph, owing in large measure to the prevision and daunt- 
less convictions of Jay, and to a natural revulsion in the minds 
of the other American commissioners against both open and 
sinister efforts of Vergennes, — a revulsion reluctantly reached, 
however, by Franklin. John Adams was confident that the 
western population could not be appeased if their expectations 
were abridged, and he had proved himself a courageous ally of 
Jay, and had insisted that with firmness and delicacy — the 
latter not precisely his own trait — the commissioners could 
get all for which they contended. Franklin was never any- 
thing if not politic. Shelburne's opinion of him was that " he 
wanted to do everything by cunning, which was the bottom of 
his character," and most Englishmen have taken that view of 
him ever since. He was certainl}' never more astute — which 
may be a more pleasing word — than in now yielding to Adams 
and Jay : and he was never more successfully judicious than in 
disarming the resentment of Vergennes, when that minister dis- 
covered how he had been foiled. So peace and independence 



PEACE SECURED. 209 

were triumphantly won, and what the AVest most needed for its 
future development was gained. 

The new boundaries had been settled on lines that ultimately 
startled even those who had conceded them, and constituted one 
of the grounds for the later assaults by Fox and his adherents. 
Of the eight hundred thousand square miles of territory with 
which the young Republic entered upon her career, one half of 
it, of which France and Si)ain would have deprived her, lay west 
of the Alleghanies. This broad extension was but the begin- 
ning of an ultimate domain, which is measured to-day by three 
and a half millions of square miles. The courts in the United 
States have always held that the territory secured through this 
treaty was not a concession of conquered lands. It was rather 
the result of a rightful partition of the British empire upon 
lines which had bounded the American colonies. Livingston, in 
letters to Franklin in January, 1782, had enforced this view : 
"The States," he says, "have considered their authority to grant 
lands to the westward coextensive with the right of Great 
Britain." This extension to the Mississippi, he again says, " is 
founded on justice ; and our claims are at least such as the 
events of the war [referring to Clark's successes] give us a 
right to insist upon," while the settlements in the West "render 
a relinquishment of the claim highly unpolitic and unjust." 

To secure these bounds, the American commissioners had 
acted almost defiantly towards France. Lee understood their 
spirit when he asked in Congress : " Shall America submit the 
destiny of the west to France, while Spain, her ally, stands 
ready to grasp it ? " Hamilton read Congress a lesson, when he 
said that it was not France who could have extorted froni us 
" humiliating or injurious concessions as the price of her assist- 
ance," but Congress, who placed France in a condition to do it, 
by imposing on the commissioners the obligation of deferring to 
Vergennes. This degradation had been felt in Congress, and 
to a demand to recede from it, the friends of those instructions 
had apologized for the injunctions by declaring them only for- 
mal ; but no one then knew that France had intrigued to secure 
their enactment as a means to save the western country to 
Sjiain. It was fortunate that under Ja^^'s lead the commission- 
ers disregarded those instructions, and Adams certainl}^ did not 
construe them as imposing the necessity of following the advice 
of Verofennes. 



210 PEACE, 1782. 

When Liviugston, after the treaty was signed, called the 
conduct of the commissioners in question for making the treaty 
without the privity of Vergennes, Jay fittingly replied that 
France could have no complaint, since the treaty had nothing in 
contravention of the treaty of 1778 ; that it coidd not be bind- 
ing till France had concluded a general treaty ; and that the 
instructions presupposed France would act in the interest of 
America, while it was proved she was planning for Spain's and 
her own advantage. Thi explanation of Jay gave the tone to 
the advocates of the commissioners in Congress. Richard 
Henry Lee said that France deprived herself of the right of 
privity when she began to plot against her American ally. 
Kutledge and Arthur Lee contended that the public good re- 
quired the action of the commissioners. 

"The English," said Vergennes, when it was all over, "had 
bought rather than made a peace." While all Europe was 
wondering at the British concessions, it is not difficult to under- 
stand the British motive. The party of peace, which Grenville 
Sharp represented, had got the upper hand. The stubbornness 
of King George and his advisers had given way to those indu- 
bitable principles which often wreck the present to settle the 
future. It had become necessary to decide whether Canada 
should be environed with a kindred people, or with the race of 
Bourbon aliens. 

As early as January, 1782, Livingston, in the uncertainty of 
the future, had intimated to Franklin that a neutral Indian 
territory beyond the mountains would be preferable to a direct 
British contact in that direction. In this the American foreign 
secretary was not probably fully aware of the purposes of France 
and Spain. In June, DAranda gave to Jay a copy of JMitch- 
ell's map, on which he had marked what he proposed to make, 
if he could, the western limits of the American States. It 
showed a line I'unning north on the back of Georgia to the 
mouth of the Kanawha, and so to Lake Erie. It afPoixled a 
recognition of the oi-ants which had been later made in the ter- 

Note. — The opposite section of a Carle generale des Treize Etals Unix et Independants de 
VAmerique Seplentrionale d^apres M. Bonne, Ingenieur Hydrographe de la Marine de France, 
1782, shows tlie French view of the limits of the United States, to be allowed by the treaty, — the 
line running soutli from " SandosktS fort " on Lake Erie. The dotted line at the top of the map 
extends to Sandusky on Lake Erie. 



212 PEACE, 1782. 

ritoiy restricted by the proclamation of 1763. All this was 
as far as the Bourbon cabinets were inclined to go. To this 
was opposed the American argument that the very prohibitions 
under that proclamation were an acknowledgment of the States' 
inherent charter rights, which that instrument had only tempo- 
rarily assailed, as Livingston had rehearsed to Franklin. 

This line drawn on Mitchell's map was the first clear indica- 
tion of what Spain was striving for. D'Aranda coupled his 
graphic argument with claiming that the Spanish capture of 
the Illinois fort had pushed their rights eastward till they 
reached the territory belonging to the Indians. Jay hardly 
needed the promj^tings of recent instructions from Livingston 
to deny the Spanish conquest and to maintain the American 
rights. 

Rayneval now put into Jay's hands a paper in which he tried 
to show that after 1763 England had never considered the 
western country a part of her " established " colonies, and that 
Spain never acquired the territory above the Natchez. The 
country between the Spanish possessions and the Alleghanies 
was, as he claimed, the inheritance of the natives, and to secure 
them in their rights he proposed a tortuous line, running north 
from the Gulf to the mouth of the Cumberland, on the east 
of which the Indians should be under the protection of the 
Americans, and on the west the Spanish should have a similar 
supervision, with an exclusive right to the navigation of the 
Mississippi. In September, Jay acquainted Vergennes that it 
was his determination to abate nothing of the Mississippi claim. 
It was a sign to the French minister that he had both alertness 
and firmness to deal with in the American commissioners. 

De Grasse, after being captured by the British fleet in the 
West Indies, had been taken to England, and, passing on 
parole from London to Paris, he is thought to have carried an 
intimation from the English cabinet which induced Vergennes 
to send Rayneval to the English capital. Oswald believed that 
Rayneval's object was to bring Shelburne to allow that both 
banks of the Mississippi should go to Spain. If he could have 
accomplished this, Vergennes, as Rayneval intimated in a paper 
which he gave to Jay, was prepared to sup])ort England at the 
final settlement in a demand for the limits of the Quebec Act. 
Rayneval had never agreed with Jay's views, and had thought 



VERGENNES AND SHELBURNE. 213 

any concession made by the American commissioner too small. 
In pressing upon Slielburne the necessity of hemming the 
Americans in on the west, he revealed for the first time to 
the English cabinet what was really the purpose of France 
and Spain, and opened the English mind to what North had 
warmly contended for, — the integrity of the bounds of 1774 in 
the Ohio valley, both as a justice to their Indian allies, and as 
preserving the forts which they had erected north of the Ohio. 
It brought back the old proposition of Vergennes, made two or 
three years before, of closing the war by dividing the western 
countr}^ between England and France. 

Vergennes's present purpose was patent. He wished to 
weaken the United States, and he desired to have England 
acknowledge that the bounds of Canada ran to the Ohio, so 
that if ever a turn in fortune rendered it possible, France 
could recover by treaty her possessions in the St. Lawrence 
valley. Just what Rayneval's purpose was in this English 
mission has been a subject of controversy. Diplomatic denials 
in the mouth of such a man count for little. If we take his 
ostensible instructions as evidenc^e, they contravene the charac- 
ter of both Vergennes and his creature. It is necessary always 
to remember that Vergennes never had any purpose but to 
aggrandize France. 

Slielburne was clearly suspicious. He saw that to release 
the Americans from the French toils, and from any evil to 
Britain resulting therefrom, was to give the new nation an 
extent of territory which would conduce to its dignity and 
buttress its independence against Bourbon intrigue. 

Oswald, the English agent, in talking with Franklin, signifi- 
cantly hinted at the recent Eussian discoveries " on the back 
of North America" as affording a possible base for a friendly 
power to move against Spain, if that country drove both Eng- 
land and the United States to extremities. "• This appeared a 
little visionary at present," said Franklin, " but I did not dis- 
pute it." 

So the Spanish and French Bourbons were thwarted in reality 
by the adhesion of England to her old colonial charters, and by 
her purpose to make them an inheritance for her emancipated 
colonics. The conquest of the northwest by Clark told in the 
final result rather more against the pretensions of Spain than 



214 



PEACE, 1782. 



against those of England. Clark himself, in Mai'ch, 1780, had 
suspected that Spain would gladly have had the British capture 
all posts east of the Mississippi, so that they might be retaken 
by her troops, to establish there a claim which would serve to 
help her to their possession at the peace. 

Confess had indeed formulated its right to the trans-Alle- 



>oels 




SOURCE OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 

[A reference to so well known a map as this of " North America " by Samuel Dunn, dated in 
1774 (nearly twenty years later than Mitchell's), and making part of the American Military 
Pocket Atlas, issued for the use of British officers, by Sayer and Bennett, London, 177G, only six 
years before the negotiations of 17S2, might have thrown doubt on the geography of the earlier 
map, if much attention had been paid to the point.] 

ghany country on these ancient charters, and it had not recog- 
nized that there was in the proclamation of 17G3 any abatement 
of those rights. Neither in the negotiations at Paris, nor in 
the planning for a public domain, had this profession been lost 
sisrht of. 



Of the territory which the treaty had saved to the Ameri- 
cans, Jefferson said at the time in his jVotci< on Virf/iina : " The 
country watered by the -Mississippi and its eastern branches 

Note. — The opposite map is from " A Plan of Captain Carver's Travels in 176C and 17C7," in 
his Travels, London, 1781. It shows the relation of White Bear Lake (touching 47''), the supposed 
source of the Mississippi, to the Lake of the Woods. 



Z. Jl KE D U li OIS 







^AXTD o^VE SSI f^^ 




PLAI2<rs| 



216 PEACE, 178-J. 

constitutes live eiglitlis of the United States, two of which five 
eighths are occupied by the Ohio and its waters ; the residuary 
streams which run into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, and 
the St. Lawrence make the remaining three eighths." 

Under her treaties with France and Spain, England claimed 
a right to use the Mississippi from its source to the sea, and 
the new treaty following an offer which »Tay had made through 
Vaughan, when he sent him to England to counteract the plots 
of Rayneval, confirmed to the United States an equal share 
with England in that navigation, and Shelburne, at the time 
in ignorance of the attendant geography, imagined that Brit- 
ish manufactures were by this privilege likely to find a new 
market. The denial of this British right to the river by Sj^ain 
led, as we shall see, to complications which gave some romantic 
interest in the near future to the history of the western settle- 
ments. England's claim to that right rested now, curiously 
enough, on the supposition that the upper reaches of the Great 
River were available for shi])ment or travel from Canadian 
territory, and when the source of the Mississippi was found to 
lie wholly within the American domain, and when the purchase 
of Louisiana in 1803 had secured both banks of the Mississippi 
to the United States, England abandoned the right, and made 
no reference to it in the treaty of 1814. 

The concession of territory which the treaty made to the 
United States in the extreme northwest was everywhere a sur- 
prise. Luzerne wrote toVergennes : "The Americaus, in push- 
ing their possessions as far as the Lake of the Woods, are 
preparing for their remote posterity a communication with the 
Pacific." The prophecy has been fulfilled. 

A discontent, much like that of France, was at once mani- 
fested in Canada at the line which the treaty had given the 
United States on the north. There was a widespread feeling 
among the Americans that England would never consent to 
dividing the Quebec of 1774. General Irvine, when in com- 
mand at Fort Pitt, had felt confident of this. Ilaldimand had 
long struggled to make the Quebec Bill effective. Now when 
he saw that his efforts had not only failed on the Ohio, Init that 
farther east the Americans had gained Niagara and Oswego, 
he felt a sense of shame in the necessity which it involved of 



THE TORIES. 217 

removing the Iroquois, the British allies, to the other side of 
Lake Ontario. This necessity made Sir John Johnson call the 
treaty an " infamous " one. 

The surging of the war had not made the fate of the Ohio 
country certain, notwithstanding the brilliant exploits of Clark. 
The negotiations at Paris had accordingly lingered, with many 
counter-plots, as we have seen, over the destiny of that region. 
Franklin at one time had feared that England was trying to 
detach France from the American alliance by offering to restore 
Canada to her, and but for Eodney's defeat of De Grasse 
(April, 1782), there might have been some chance of it. The 
English, on the other hand, had had their fits of distrust for 
fear that France might prevent the United States coming to 
an independent negotiation, when the Ohio country woidd have 
been the consideration in other diplomatic bargains. That Eng- 
land had a lingering hope in some way to secure that country 
as a refuge for the loyalists is evident. " We did not want 
such neighbors," said Franklin, who had been too much ex- 
asperated against the Tories soberly to estimate what a loss 
the country was to suffer by their expulsion. Franklin indeed 
had suggested to Oswald that these political outlaws should 
even be denied a home in Canada, and that the American juris- 
diction ought to extend to the Arctic circle and so accomplish 
their exclusion. He added, with a mock graciousness, that per- 
haps some of the Canadian waste lauds could be sold to indem- 
nify the royalists for the confiscation of their estates. This 
was an intimation that he very soon regretted he had given. 
He confessed, however, that there might be some Americans 
who felt that Canada in British hands would be the best guar- 
antee of the American Union. 

It has been claimed by Dr. Wharton, in his International 
Laio Digest (iii. 913), that if Franklin had not been hampered 
by his fellow negotiators, he would probably have secured 
Canada to the United States, but there is little ground for such 
a belief. He could have had as little hope of it, when the test 
came, as Vergennes had of restoring the ancient reign of France 
within its borders. Grenville, in a letter to Fox, stated the 
question squarely when he said that England would naturally 
see little reason to give away a fourteenth' province, after she 
had lost thirteen. 



218 PEACE, 1782. 

The acquisition of the country between the Ohio and the 
lakes, the joint control of most of the midland seas and the en- 
tire jurisdiction over others, was of itself a prosperous stroke. 
It carried a sufficient success, even though England did not 
concede the navigation of the lower St. Lawrence, which she in 
fact denied down to the conclusion of the reciprocity treaty 
in 1854. 

There had been, during the closing months of the negotia- 
tions, more than one jn-ojjosition as to these northern bounds 
submitted to the English ministry. 

Rayneval, as we have shown, had been content to leave the 
question to English diplomacy, never once questioning that she 
would stubbornly stand by the Quebec Bill, and Vergennes, 
when the final negotiations were approaching, had written to 
Luzerne that the Americans had no claim whatever to carve 
away any part of the Quebec of 1774. Oswald, however, had 
felt the pressure of Franklin, and he had pointedly reported to 
Townshend that to reduce Quebec to the limits which it had 
under the proclamation of 1763 was " necessary and indispen- 
sable " to a peace. Accordingly, Townshend, on September 1, 
instructed the British agent to consent " to a confinement of the 
boundaries of Canada, at least, to what they were before the act 
of Parliament of 1774, if not to a still more contracted state 
on an ancient footing." This was practically an acceptance of 
the Nipissing line of 1763. Jay met the occasion within a 
short time, and on October 5 put into Oswald's hands some 
articles which Franklin had ap]:)roved, and which embraced 
this Nipissing line, which turned from the St. Lawrence at 45° 
north latitude, and ran straight to Lake Nipissing, and thence 
to the source of the Mississippi. Three days later, Oswald 
forwarded the draft to London for his Majesty's consideration. 

The line did not, as Franklin had anticipated, prove satis- 
factory, and Strachey, one of the under-secretaries, was sent to 
Paris to strengthen Oswald's hands, bearing a letter to him 
dated October 23. There had intervened some military suc- 
cesses for the British arms, and the ministry felt more encoiir- 
aged in their ability to press a recognition by the United States 
of the loyalists' claims to the Ohio country. Accordingly, 
Strachey was expected either to secure this, or, as an alterna- 
tive, to push the northeastern boundary from the St. Croix 



THE BOUNDARIES, 219 

westward to the Penobscot. But it was too late, and the Amer- 
ican commissioners were as firm as ever. 

In November, Strachey sent to the foreign secretary a new 
draft of a treaty, accompanied by a map which showed Os- 
wakl's line, and two others, now submitted by the Americans, 
who were prepared to accept either one of them. One of these 
lines followed the 45tli parallel due west to the Mississippi, 
thereby accepting the peninsula between Lake Ontario and 
Lake Huron in lieu of what now constitutes the upper parts of 
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The other pi-oposition 
was a line starting from where the 45th parallel touched the 
St. Lawrence, and following the mid-channel of river and lakes 
westward and beyond Lake Superior. This line took the re- 
verse in the exchange of peninsular territories. Strachey, in 
his letter accompanying the draft, recommended that certain 
" loose " expressions in it should be " tightened " in the en- 
grossment of it in London, and premised that the American 
commissioners were "• the greatest quibblers " he had ever 
known. They had been quibbling to some effect. 

The foreign secretary, on November 19, at the instance of 
the Duke of Richmond, adopted the mid-lake line, and urged 
the signing of the treaty before the assembling of Parliament. 
Eleven days later it was signed, and in sending it the same day 
to London, Strachey wrote : " God forbid, if I shoidd ever 
have a hand in another peace ! " John Adams said : " The 
peace depended absoluteh^ upon the critical moment when it 
was signed, and haste was inevitable." 

On December 10, Strachey, who had in the mean while gone 
to London, wrote back to Oswald that he had found " Mr. 
Townshend and Lord Shelburne perfectly satisfied." The sat- 
isfaction did not prove, however, sufficient to insure quiet. 

The American commissioners might well congratulate Liv- 
ingston that the bounds which tliey had secured showed little to 
complain of and not much to desire. But in England upon 
second tliought, and in Canada at once, there was little of such 
complacency, because of the weiglity loss which befell the mer- 
cantile interests. The trade of Canada was not very great, but 
it was its all. Shelburne congratulated himself that while 
Canada afforded only .£50,000 annual revenue, he had put an 



220 PEACE, 1782. 

end to the war which had cost £800,000 a year. The treaty's 
partition of the valley of the Great Lakes had, moreover, dealt 
a blow to Canada in throwing more than half of the west- 
ern trade in skins — reckoned at X180,000 — into the con- 
trol of the Americans. It was estimated that not far from 
fonr tlionsand Indians of the watershed of the upper lakes were 
accustomed to gather for trade at Mackinac, which was also 
by tlie treaty brought within the American bounds. Haldi- 
mand, by dispatching Calve to them, lost no time in trying by 
seductive speeches to keep these tribesmen faithful to British 
interests. The North West Company of Montreal stood ready 
to profit by such opportunities as long as the surrender to the 
Americans of the western posts could be delayed. Through 
tins postponement the company was enabled for some years to 
control the trade of the more distant west through stations at 
La Baye and Prairie du Chien. 

The traffic which the Canadians had long conducted through- 
out the region northwest of Lake Superior was now likewise 
threatened by the Grand Portage becoming, under the treaty, 
the American boundary. This passage was the water-way — 
called by a misconception in the treaty Long Lake — which with 
some interruptions connected Lake Superior with the Lake of 
the Woods. The trade passing along this communication had 
amounted to about X50,000 annually, and there were nearly 
three hundred men yearly following it at tlie end of a course of 
eighteen hundred miles from Montreal. Haldimand, prompted 
by the solicitude of the Canadian traders, had advised them 
not at present to throw any doubt on the divisionary line which 
was to be tracked along these linked and unlinked waters. 
To question it would, he feared, lead to a joint survey, and that 
to a disclosure to the Americans of the channels of trade in 
that direction. Meanwhile the Canadians had begun to search 
for another portage wholly on British ground, and one Frobisher 
had speedily found it by the wa}^ of Lake Nepigon. 

This passage of the Grand Portage was supposed by the 
commissioners in Paris to be the true source of the St. Lawrence 
waters by a water-way of a steady incline, but broken by carry- 
ing-places. It was really known by those more familiar with 
the country to be cut by a divide which turned the streams on 
one hand to Lake Superior and on the other to the Lake of the 



THE GRAND PORTAGE. 221 

Woods. Modern exploration, indeed, as the line is run, has 
shown several minor divides in addition. It is said that the 
snggestion of making this broken current the line of the treaty 
came from one Peter Pond, a native of Boston, who had been 
connected with the North West Company, and whose represen- 
tations were accepted by the English commissioners. This 
was easier for them, because Pond's statements seemed to be 
in accordance with Mitchell's map of 1755, the princij^al one 
used by the negotiators. In this map, as in all the contempo- 
rary maps, Lake Superior is shown to be well filled with islands ; 
and the mid-water line, athwart the lake, Avas defined as passing 
the northern end of Phillipeaux Island on its way to the Grand 
Portage. This was in accordance with a belief that the north 
end lay nearly opposite the entrance of the water-way. The 
fact is, that it is much more nearly on a line with the south end, 
and by this misconception the international line on modern 
maps makes an unexpected turn in order to throw that island 
on the American side. 

It was at that time also supposed that a line passing from 
Lake Superior up this water-way and crossing the Lake of the 
Woods would at the northwest angle of that lake strike the 
49° of latitude, and if then continued due west on that parallel, 
that it would strike the Mississippi somewhere in its upper 
parts. Mitchell had not exactly figured this condition in liis 
map, but it could be iufei*red from what he did show. 

In 1785, this same vagrant Bostonian Pond made, as we shall 
see, a plot of this region, in which he was the first to emphasize 
the fact that the Mississippi really rose far south of the 49° of 
latitude, and so cut off Englishmen from the chance of navigat- 
ing that river. This development actually left a space of about 
one hundred miles between the springs of the Great Eiver and 
the Lake of the Woods. In this interval there was, of course, 
by the treaty no definition of bounds, — a difficulty solved after 
Louisiana was acquired by dro}iping the line due south from 
the lake till it reached the 49th parallel, along which the 
boundary was then carried w^est to the mountains. 

The proclamation of 17G3 was the cause of other difficul- 
ties on the southern border. Florida at the general peace was 



222 PEACE, 178.2. 

restored to Spain, England having held it since 1763. It was 
the sole success of the miserable intrigue in which Spain had 
been engaged, and if the later admission of Lord Lansdowne 
(Shelburne) is to be believed, England yielded it now in the 
hopes that it would embroil the United States and Spain in the 
future. Whether yielded for that purpose or not, it certainly 
became a bone of contention, and D'Aranda is said to have 
warned his sovereign that it would. 

Its retention by England would, under the secret clause of the 
new treaty which had been agreed upon, have stopped the bounds 
of the Repixblic at the latitude of the mouth of the Yazoo, 32° 
28', instead of carrying them farther south to 31°, — another 
result of the proclamation of 1763, and equally the source of 
later troubles with Spain. Notwithstanding such a diminution 
of the Republic's area. Jay had hoped the negotiation would 
have left west Florida in the hands of England, and in the 
usual ignorance of the geography of the source of the Missis- 
sippi, he urged it upon the English commissioners as affording 
near the mouth of that river a complement of the commercial 
rights which they acquired at the source. 

The fact that England in the proclamation of 1763 had an- 
nexed this debatable territory — now containing perha^ss ten 
thousand inhabitants — to west Florida, as well as Galvez's 
successes in capturing the English posts within it, was the 
ground of the claim which Spain urged for possessing to the 
Yazoo. If Congress, in 1779, had yielded to the importunities 
of Patrick Henry, and had succeeded in doing what Galvez 
later did, the secret clause of 1782 might have proved effective. 
As it was, the success of Galvez had been at the time grateful 
to Congress, and when, at the close of the war, Oliver Pollock 
presented to that body a portrait of his friend, the Spanish gov- 
ernor, it was accepted " in consideration of his eai'ly and jealous 
friendship, frequently manifested in behalf of these States." 

If the United States, in the conclusions which had been 
reached, had any occasion for gratitude, it was because in the 
perilous issue England for a brief interval showed something of 
that " sweet reconciliation " which Hartley and Franklin had 
talked so much about, for that temporary blandness came, as 
John Adams said, at the right moment to serve America's terri- 



VERGENNES. 223 

torial ambition. Certainly, the United States had no ground 
for gratitude to France or Spain, neither of which had any other 
intention than to aggrandize the other, humiliate England, and 
cripple America. Fortunately, to secure these results the inde- 
pendence of the United States was necessary, and this was the 
only proposition to which Vergennes was constant. There was 
indeed no reason to expect anything else of the Bourbon polit- 
ical twins. " The Americans know too much of politics," said 
Talleyrand, ''to believe in the virtue called gratitude between 
nations. They know that disinterested services are alone enti- 
tled to that pure sentiment, and that there are no such services 
between States." This was the key to the diplomacy of that 
age, and times have not much changed. 

Sparks in his time, and Wharton of late years, trusting too 
implicitly in the public and even confidential professions of Ver- 
gennes and Kayneval, — two so expert masters of duplicity that 
they needed constantly to struggle to prevent duplicity becom- 
ing masters of them, — have believed that the suspicions of Jay 
and Adams as to the purposes of France were without founda- 
tion, and that Franklin had the clearest conception of the situa- 
tion ; but the publications of Circourt, Fitzmaurice, Doniol, 
and Stevens have indicated that the insight and prevision of 
Jay was true, when, a fortnight before the treaty was signed, 
he wrote to Livingston as follows : " This court is interested in 
separating us from Great Britain, and on that point we may, I 
believe, depend upon them ; but it is not their interest that we 
should become a great and formidable people, and therefore 
they will not help us to become so. It is their interest to keep 
some point or other in contest between us and Britain to the 
end of the war, to prevent the possibility of our sooner agree- 
ing, and thereby keep us employed in the war and dependent 
on them for supplies. Hence they have favored and will con- 
tinue to favor the British demands as to matters of boundary 
and the Tories." 

The provisional treaty was made definitive on September 3, 
1783, after England, France, and Spain had agreed among 
themselves to other terms of peace in the preceding January. 
The interval since the signing of the preliminary treaty had 
allowed England time, through new political leaders in the coali- 



224 



PEACE, 178:2. 



tion with North, which Fox managed, to recover from her trac- 
table mood, and the final treaty was signed by those who did 
not formulate it. It was useless to hope in the revision for the 
rectification of what John Adams called " inaccuracies," and 
its lan-iuaire was unchanoed. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

1783-1787. 

The war for indeijendence was over. Jefferson reckoned 
that the struggle had cost the people o£ the United States 
something like ^1-10,000, 000, while it had caused England the 
ineffectual expenditure of at least five times as much. It was 
acknowledged in the House of Commons that every soldier sent 
across the sea had cost <£100 sterling. Brissot, with only a\^- 
proximate correctness, ])ut it rather strikingly : " The Ameri- 
cans pay less than a million sterling a year for having main- 
tained their liberty, while the English pay more than four mil- 
lion sterling additional annual expense for having attempted 
to rob them of it." 

But this monetary disparity was no test of the far greater 
loss which Great Britain had suffered. Her dominion had been 
curtailed by a million square miles, as it was then computed, 
and this territory constituted an area best assured of a future 
among all her possessions. Her prestige was injured, and her 
hereditary enemy across the Channel gloated on the spectacle. 
Her colonial children had been divided : a part of them were 
left suspicious of her, the rest were looking to her for substan- 
tial recognition of their loyalty. Her savage allies had been 
turned over to the tender mercies of those whose possessions 
they had ravaged. There was a population of about three and 
a quarter million, mostly her kin in blood, whom she had alien- 
ated when she most needed their support. All this had hap- 
pened because her ministry were blind to the advance of luniian 
ideas, and were stubborn in support of an obstinate king, who 
could not see that the world moved on, and that there was an 
inevitable waning of old assumptions in the royal prerogative 
and Parliamentary rights. 

The American commissioners had made a triumph under the 



226 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

guiding influence of Jay and Adams, as Hamilton at the time 
recognized, which cut by a double edge. Not only had Eng- 
land felt one edge, but France had felt the other. " The 
Count de Vergennes and I," said one of these commissioners, 
" were pursuing different objects. He was endeavoring to 
make my countrymen meek and humble, and I was laboring to 
make them proud." It proved, indeed, the pride that goetli 
before a fall, and that fall was very near being a fatal one 
when, some years later, John Adams's predictions were verified. 
" England and France," he said to the president of Congress, 
September 5, 1783, " will be most perfectly nnited in all artifices 
and endeavors to keep down our reputation at home and abroad, 
to mortify our self-conceit, and to lessen us in the opinion of the 
world." 

A few days after the signing of the preliminaries, John 
Adams, addressing Oswald, one of the British commissioners, 
deprecated any resentment which the mother country might be 
disposed to harbor. " Favor and promote the interests, reputa- 
tion, and dignity of the United States," he said, " in everything 
that is consistent with your own. If you pursue the plan of 
cramping, crippling, and weakening America, on the supposi- 
tion that she will be a rival to yon, you will make her really so ; 
you will make her the natural and perpetual ally of yonr natu- 
ral and perpetual enemies," — and she came near doing so. 
Some days after Adams had written thus. Jay, in addressing 
the secretary of foreign affairs (December 14, 1782), said in 
explanation of the complacency shown by Britain in the pre- 
liminaries, and in the king's speech : " In the continuance of 
this disposition and system, too much confidence ought not to 
be placed, for disappointed violence and mortified ambition are 
certainly dangerous foundations to build implicit confidence 
npon." 

A few months later. Jay again wrote (April 22, 1783) : 
" They mean to court us, and in my opinion we should avoid 
being either too forward or too coy. . . . There are circum- 
stances which induce me to believe that Spain is turning her 
eyes to England for a more intimate connection. They are 
the only two European powers which have continental posses- 
sions on our side of the water, and Spain, I think, wishes for 
a league between them for mutual security against us." 



CRITICAL CONDITIONS. 227 

Similar apprehensions were shared by sagacious observers 
on both sides. Madison wrote to his father (January, 1783) : 
•■■ The insidiousness and instability of the British cabinet forbid 
us to be sanguine." Hamilton warned (March 17, 1783) Wash- 
ington of the " insincerity and duplicity of Lord Shelburne." 
Benjamin Vaughan wrote in February from London that the 
treaty " had put many good people into ill humor, and it 
has given a thousand pretexts to the bad people among us." 
Franklin found it easy to believe that any change of affairs in 
Europe, or mishaps among the Americans, would find the min- 
istry ready to renew the war, for, as he wrote, the British court 
" is not in truth reconciled either to us or the loss of us." Pie 
maintained this opinion steadily, and wrote (September 13) to 
the president of Congress that the English court " would never 
cease entleavoring to disunite us." These views were reflected 
in the expressions of Richard Henry Lee, William Bingham, 
and many others. 

In entering upon its new career, the young Republic was in- 
deed surrounded by hazards greater than she had surmounted. 
When, on January 20, 1783, hostilities were declared at an 
end, they gave place to internal dissensions and external in- 
trigues. These things stai-tled the steadfast patriots. " There 
has not been a more critical, delicate, and interesting period 
during the war," wrote Elias Boudinot to Washington. AYash- 
ington at one time was forced to say of the sad conditions : " I 
think there is more wickedness than ignorance mixed with our 
coimcils." 

Jay, in September, 1783, was ui-ging upon Gouverneur Mor- 
ris : " Everything conducing to union and constitutional energy 
of government should be cultivated, cherished, and protected, 
and all counsels and measures of a contrary complexion should 
at least be suspected of impolitic views and objects." 

A better spirit of union might have parried some of the 
dangers, but there were others naturally inseparable from 
having for neighbors on the northern frontiers those who, when 
the treaty was sobei-ly reviewed, saw how much they had lost. 
Still greater peril came from the inherent weakness of the con- 
federacy. 

Edmund Randolph wrote to Washington : " The nerves of 



228 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

government are unstrung, both in energy and money, and the 
fashion of the day is to cahimniate the best services if un- 
successful." Franklin felt that these rumors of incapacity and 
wrong were doing the State much injury, and persistently held 
that matters were better than they seemed. " Our domestic 
misunderstandings," he wrote to Hartley, " are of small extent, 
though monstrously magnified by your microscopic newspapers." 
Hartley had warned Franklin while the negotiations of peace 
were pending that the victorious States might, after all, reject 
the authority of Congress, as they had that of Britain, so that 
the peace would be but the ill-fated moment for relaxing all 
control. Hamilton wrote to Washington on March 17, 1783 : 
" There is a fatal opposition to continental views. Necessity 
alone can work a i-eform. But how produce this necessity ? 
how apply it ? how keep it within salutary bounds ? I fear we 
have been contending for a shadow." There was no better 
proof of it than the fact that not a quarter of the requisi- 
tions which Congress had made, and was to make, on the States 
for the necessary expenses of government were and could be 
met. The need of a central controlling power was more and 
more engaging the attention of circumspect observers. Hamil- 
ton now undertook to devise a plan of a military establishment 
for the peace. He urged that a system independent of and 
controlling the separate States was essential, if the western 
country was to be protected and the navigation of the Missis- 
sippi to be secured. 

It was soon evident, such was the laxity of the bonds between 
the States, that the stipulations of the recent treaty could not be 
enforced. The only power to hold the States to their obliga- 
tions in this respect was that same Congress whose demands were 
of no avail in asking pecuniary support for the government. 

That there existed a disposition on both sides not honestly to 
observe the conditions of the treaty was only too apparent, 
— on the part of the British because they did not wish to ob- 
serve them, and on the part of the American Congress because 
they could not. Jefferson spoke of Congress as " inactive spec- 
tators of the infractions because they had no effectual power 
to control them." Adams contended that the British ministry 



THE LAKE POSTS. 229 

were in the first instance responsible for a breach of the com- 
pact. Jay maintained that the blame lay with the Americans, 
and he said to John Adams " that there had not been a single 
day, since the treaty took effect, in which it had not been vio- 
lated by one or other of the States." 

It is safe, however, to assume with Richard Henry Lee, " that 
both countries were to blame, and transgressions were on each 
side coequal." Hamilton said, "The question is one so mixed 
and doul)tful as to render a waiver expedient on our part." At 
the end of a long controversy over this point of first responsi- 
bility, it was " Curtius's " opinion that " the parties were as 
remote from agreement as when they began." The real appre- 
hension was whether either side, actuated by passion, shovdd 
take advantage of the infractions of the other, and deliberately 
put common concessions out of reach. Hamilton remonstrated 
with Governor Clinton on such " intemperate proceedings " in 
New York as really put the treaty in jeopardy. 

That breach of the treaty which seriously affected our western 
history was in the detention of the military posts on the Great 
Lakes, which were, by the terms of the treaty, included in the 
concessions to the Republic. There was, perhaps, some ground 
for the fear, on the part of the British, that the concession had 
seemed like abandoning their Indian allies, and that some time 
was needed to reconcile them to the change. Such had been 
the fear of Hartley, and he had proposed for the definitive 
articles a delay of three yeai'S in which to pacify the tribes. 
The siappression on the part of the English, however, for a 
long time of any reason for the detention was in a high degree 
irritating. When it was announced, it proved an allegation 
that threw the blame upon the Americans, since it was held 
that there had been obstruction in the several States to the col- 
lection of British debts, which were to be paid under the terms 
of the peace, and that the posts were retained as security for the 
ixnpaid indebtedness. There can be no doid)t that the rightful 
processes of law for collecting debts had been impeded, as Jay 
in his report acknowledged. Hamilton, in his Observations on 
Jdjfs Treaty^ points out that various acts respecting the British 
debts, in New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, antedated 
the conclusion of the ti'eaty, as fixed in the final ratifications. 



230 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

Rhode Island, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia had 
made the debts payable in depreciated paper money, when the 
obligation was in sterling. Congress virtually acknowledged 
this when it called upon the States (April 13, 1787) to repeal 
these same laws. Hamilton further urged it was " an usurpa- 
tion upon the part of any State to take upon itself the business 
of retaliation." Indeed, Pennsylvania, in showing that one of her 
acts complained of had in reality been passed before the treaty 
was made, pointedly affirmed that " when treaties are broken 
on the one part, representatives from the other contracting 
party to repair the breach should always precede retaliation." 

Meanwhile, the debtors themselves were flying over the 
mountains, where they could not be followed, impoverishing 
in some degree the producing power of the east, and adding 
to that population which Franklin, in his Sending Felons to 
America, charged the British government with pouring into the 
States. Boudinot, then president of Congress, had early fore- 
seen the difficulty. On April 12, 1783, he wrote to Lafayette : 
" The terms of peace give universal satisfaction, except that 
no time is mentioned for the American merchants paying their 
English debts. Having the greatest part of their estates in the 
public funds, and having suffered greatly by the depreciation of 
the money, inevitable ruin must be their portion if they have not 
three or four years to accomplish the business." Congress did, 
indeed, in the following June, send instructions to have a limit 
of three years for paying the debts inserted in the definitive 
treaty, but no change was made. Franklin, in a more exasper- 
ated spirit, rebuked the British importunity, when he said it was 
British depredations that had made Americans unable to meet 
the demands of their British creditors. As the years went on, 
and the liquidation of the debts was still arrested, Tom Paine 
reminded the British creditors that it was their commercial 
restrictions that interfered with the course of justice, in de- 
priving the American merchant of his legitimate gains. It 
was estimated that these debts amounted to about $28,000,000, 
and to this $14,000,000 in interest was to be added, making 
$42,000,000 in all. It was Jay's advocacy of paying this in- 
terest that came near at a later day (1794) defeating his con- 
firmation as special envoy to England. Kufus King thought 
that no jury would award interest. John Adams claimed that 
the war had anmdled Eno-land's risfhts to interest. 



DEPORTATION OF SLAVES. 231 

The chief infringements of the treaty on the American side 
were due to Virginia. It was owing to her tobacco crop that 
her planters now owed nearly as much as all the other States 
combined. Brissot put it in this way : " The independent 
Americans have bat little money. This scarcity rises from two 
causes. First, from the kind of commerce they heretofore have 
carried on with England, and afterwards from the ravages of a 
seven years' war. This commerce was purely one of exchange, 
and in certain States, as Virginia, the importations always sur- 
passed the exportations, and the result was that they could not 
but be debtors to England." 

This question of the creditors' obligations was mixed up in 
the public mind with a rightful demand for compensation due 
the Americans for the loss of fugitive slaves, carried off by the 
British at the evacuation of New York. The president of Con- 
gress wrote to Franklin, June 18, 1783 : " It has been an ill- 
judged scheme in the British to retain New York so long, and 
send off the negroes, as it has roused the spirit of the citizens 
of the several States greatly." The value of such slaves was 
placed by their former possessors at more than -f 400,000, and 
they were said to number, adults and children, less than three 
thousand, as commissioners, sent to watch the evacuation of New 
York, reported. 

That this deportation of the blacks took place was acknow- 
ledged by Pitt, but it was contended that when the slaves fled 
within the British lines, in some instances in response to Carle- 
ton's proclamations, they became British property, and could 
be rightfully carried off like other acquired chattels, and that 
the terms of the treaty had reference only to seizing slaves for 
the purpose of carrying them off, which had not been done, 
though tliere was a doubt in some cases if the slaves had not 
come within the British lines after the signing of the treaty. 
Joseph Jones wrote to Madison that this rape of the blacks 
would inevitably be used to justify delay in paying the British 
debts. Hamilton contended that if it was infamous in Great 
Britain to seduce the negroes, it would have been still more 
infamous to surrender them back to slavery. He held that the 
British interpretation had much in its favor, and the act was 
not " such a clear breach of treaty as to justify retaliation." On 



232 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

luucli the same grouncLs the British might demand, it was 
contended, the deserters from their service who had yielded to 
American seductions. At all events, this carrying- off of slaves 
instigated the Virginia Assembly in May, 1784, to put statu- 
tory obstacles in the way of English creditors. Patrick Henry 
was a warm advocate of these retaliatory acts. Kichard Henry 
Lee and others of less passionate mood opposed them, but in 
vain. Among the soberer remonstrants was George Mason, 
who wrote to Mr. Henry : " On the whole, we have better terms 
of peace than America had cause to expect, and I cannot but 
think it would be highly dangerous and imprudent to risk a 
breach of the peace." In the sequel, Virginia grew more mod- 
erate, and there was talk of a plan to liquidate the debts in 
seven annual installments. Jefferson could flatter himself that 
before the last installment of the debts was paid, the value of 
the deported slaves could be reserved. Virginia, meanwhile, 
had made her compliance contingent upon that of the other 
States, and upon the surrender of the deported negroes. In 
these demands, as in her imperative demands for the evacuation 
of the posts, she was led by Patrick Henry. Congress in the 
end, and on a report from Jay, did, as we have seen, what it 
coxdd to induce the recalcitrant States to purge their statute- 
books of all laws hindering the collection of such debts ; the 
relief, however, was not absolute till the adoption of the Federal 
Constitution gave such matters into other hands. 

Thus the most serious risk of the peace came from that State 
wliich, in her territorial extension, claimed to have gained most 
by the persistent efforts of the peace commissioners to carry 
the Republic's bounds to the Mississipjii. 

There was another British plea for the retention of the west- 
ern posts which had far less justification. The American com- 
missioners had resolutely refused to guarantee any compensa- 
tion to loyalists for their losses, and the British agents had as 
persistently refused to make reparation for private property 
of the patriot party destroyed during the war. It was Jay's 
opinion that " Dr. Franklin's firmness and exertion "' on the 
American side did much to maintain their ground. All which 
the Anierican commissioners would concede was in the fifth 
article of the treaty, that Congress should recommend to the 



THE TORIES. 233 

several state assemblies to repeal their confiscation acts, and 
make such restitution of property already confiscated as they 
could consistently. The sixth article, however, required that 
there should be uo future confiscations or persecutions, — a pro- 
vision which, it nuist be confessed, was subjected by some, as 
Hamilton said, to a " subtle and evasive interpretation." 

The American people naturally rated the Tories by the worst 
of them, and how little sympathy there was for them can be con- 
ceived from Franklin's statement of their case : " The war 
against us was begun by a general act of Parliament declaring 
all our States confiscated, and probably one great motive to the 
loyalty of the royalists was the hope of sharing in these confis- 
cations. They have played a deep game, staking their estates 
against ours, and they liave been unsuccessful." " As to the 
Tories," said Jay, " who have received damage from us, why so 
much noise about them and so little said or thought of Whigs, 
who have suffered ten times as much from these same Tories ? " 
Carleton, with undue haste, had pressed Congress to do what 
had been promised for it ; but Livingston replied that no action 
could be taken till the articles of peace wei'e ratified, when, as 
he alleged, the recommendation of Congress would be received 
with more respect, after the " asperities of the war shall be worn 
down." When Lady Juliana Penn appealed to Jay for the 
restoration of her rights in Pennsylvania, he replied (December 
4, 1782) : " There is reason to expect that whatever undue 
degree of severity may have been infused into our laws by a 
merciless war and a strong sense of injuries will yield to the 
influences of those gentler emotions which the mild and cheerful 
season of peace and tranquillity must naturally excite." The 
recommendation called for by the treaty was in due time made 
by Congress, but the States, having the matter in their own 
discretion, show^ed no inclination to favor the loyalists. 

The commissioners, who were aware that the terms of the 
treaty in this respect were considered in Europe " very humili- 
ating to Britain," insisted, in a commiuiication to Congress 
(September 10, 1783), that the provisions of the treaty should 
be carried out "in good faith and in a manner least offensive to 
the feelings of the king and court of Great Britain, who upon 
that point are extremely tender. The unseasonable and unne- 
cessary resolves of various towns on this subject," they added, 



234 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

" the actual expulsion of Tories from some places, and the 
avowed implacability of almost all who have published their 
sentiments about the matter, are circumstances which are con- 
strued, not only to the prejudice of our national magnanimity 
and good faith, but also to the prejudice of our government." 
Nevertheless, the States were content to feel, as apparently 
Franklin in his heart felt, that the recommendatory clause of 
the treaty was simply embodied to dismiss the matter, and, if 
any relief was to be afforded the loyalists, there was naturally a 
general acquiescence in the belief that their relief should wait 
the withdrawal of the British forces. The fate that should then 
befall them was perhaps expressed as considerately as was likely 
to be the case in what Jay wrote : " I think the faithless and 
cruel should be banished forever and their estates confiscated ; 
it is just and reasonable. As to the residue, who have either 
upon principle openly and fairly opjjosed us, or who from 
timidity have fled from the storm and remained inoffensive, 
let us not punish the first for behaving like men, nor be ex- 
tremely severe to the latter because nature had made them like 
women." 

So the debts and the loyalists were made by the British min- 
istry to justify as best they could the retention of these lake 
posts for the next twelve years, with all the repression which it 
implied upon the development of the northwest, which amounted, 
in Hamilton's opinion, to the value of ^£100, 000 a year. 

Two or three months after the preliminaries of peace had 
been received. Congress, with the same precipitancy which char- 
acterized Carleton in urging action about the loyalists, in- 
structed Washinoton to arrange with Haldimand for the same 
speedy transfer of these posts at the west and on the lakes as 
had been made of the ])ort of New York, The stations in 
question were those at Mackinac, Detroit, \Y abash, Miami, 
Fort Erie, Niagara, Oswego, and a few minor points, including 
two on Lake Champlain. The post at Detroit carried with it 
some two or three thousand neighboring inhabitants, and there 
were, in addition, some other settlers near Dutchman's Point. 
Accordingly, on July 12, 1783, Washington wrote to Haldimaud 
and dispatched Steuben with the letter. On August 3, the 
American general, having reached Chambly, sent his credentials 



THE INDIANS AND THE TREATY. 235 

forwai'd, and Haldimand hastened to the Sorel to meet him. 
It was then that Haldimand, with great civihty, orally declined 
to discuss the matter without definite orders from his superiors, 
and a few days later took the same position in letters which he 
addressed to Steuben and to Washington. The English general 
also declined to allow Steuben to proceed to an inspection of the 
posts. Steuben later told the president of Congress that in his 
opinion the British were " planning their schemes in Canada for 
holding the frontier posts for a year or two longer." 

Hartley, indeed, had anticipated in the course of the nego- 
tiations at Paris, as has been shown, that the Indians would 
find themselves by the treaty " betrayed into the hands of that 
people against whom they had been incited to war," and that 
it was as necessary to treat them warily as it was that pro- 
vision should first be made for the traders. Already, in August, 

1783, the British traffickers at the upper posts had complained 
of American interference with their profits in a trade which 
was known to be worth X50,000, in the region beyond Lake 
Superior. A little later the Montreal merchants represented 
that the trade of Mackinac comprised three quarters of the 
entire trade in the Mississippi valley between 39° and 60° of 
latitude. The finest fur country was represented to be that 
south of Lake Superior, but here hardly a quarter of its pos- 
sible yield was secured, owing to the irascibility of the Sioux. 
Well might Frobisher, one of the leading traders, contend that 
it would be a " fatal moment " when the posts were given up. 
Hartley's reasons for delay in surrendering this trade were 
precisely those now advanced by Plaldimand in reporting his 
action to Lord North, and he was doubtless right in alleging 
that undue haste might incite the savages about the posts to 
war, while the traders dependent on them needed time to close 
their accounts. After waiting nearly a year for such molli- 
fying and conclusive effects, Ilaldinumd on his jiart in April, 

1784, asked instructions fi'om Lord North ; and Knox, on the 
other hand, on May 12, 1784, was ordered to make a new 
demand, and sent Colonel Hall, who in July was dismissed by 
Haldimand with the same courtesy, because no orders to sur- 
render the posts had been received. Previous to this, on April 
9, Great Britain had ratified the definitive treaty, as Congress 
had done on January 14 preceding, and in August Plaldimand 



236 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

was in possession of the verified document. It was now appar- 
ent that the issue had become a serious one. The question was 
not only upon the language of the treaty, " with all convenient 
speed," but also upon the i)ropriety of considering the provi- 
sional or the definitive treaty as the true date for release. The 
Atlantic ports had indeed been given up after the provisional 
treaty, but that was an act of mutual convenience. It was 
Hamilton's opinion that the practice of nations in similar cases 
was not decisive ; while the United States had seemed to agree 
to the longer period by deferring its legislative recommenda- 
tions till after the final treaty had been ratified. 

It has sometimes been alleged that the retention of the posts 
was simply an expedient to force the Americans to make such 
terms with the Indians as the British commissioners had failed 
to make by the treaty, and possibly to gain some vantage- 
ground in case there might be a further rectification of the 
frontier. 

The relation of the frontiers with the tribes was certainly a 
critical one, and largely because of the neglect of the Indian 
interests by tlie British. Patrick Henry was urging at this 
time an amalgamation of races, and he desired to have bounties 
offered for half-breed children as a means of pacification ; but 
there was generally greater faith in muskets. General Jedediah 
Huntington was now recommending to Washington the sending 
of some five or six hundred regulars to the frontiers, for the 
military situation in the west was looking serious. At the peace, 
according to Pickering's estimate, it had been thought that more 
than eight hundred troops would be necessary to garrison the 
entire frontier, north, west, and south. That officer had then 
assigned one hundred and twenty men to Niagara, " the most 
important pass in America," sixty to Detroit, and one lunidred 
to the farther lake posts. In June, 1784, Monroe urged Con- 
gress to be prepared to maintain a western force ; but all he 
could accomplish was to secure some seven hundred twelve- 
months' militia from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and 
Pennsylvania, to protect the frontier. 

Indian outrages were renewed on the frontiers in the spring 
of 1783, and in April, Dickinson of Pennsylvania was moving 
Congress to take some effective steps. On May 1, Congress 
ordered that the northwestern tribes should be officially in- 



THE FUR TRADE. 237 

formed o£ the terms of the peace, and one Ephraim Douglas 
was sent to Detroit. De Peyster, the British commander at 
that post, was found by Douglas to have given the Indians the 
impression that the posts were still to be retained by the Brit- 
ish. On July G, in the presence of the American agent, De 
Pe3'ster urged the Indians to be quiet, and told them that he 
could no longer keep them, and gave Douglas an opportunity to 
explain the treaty. A few days later, Douglas went to Niagara, 
where Genei'al McLean was now feeding three thousand Indians, 
and there had an interview with Brant. This chieftain disclosed 
that the Indian lands must be secured to the tribes before any 
treaties could be made. Douglas reported to General Lincoln, 
now secretary of war, that he was neither permitted to accom- 
pany Brant to the jNIohawk villages, nor to address the Indians. 
Simon Girty, who was De Peyster's interpreter, served in the 
same capacity later for Sir John Johnson, when another confer- 
ence was held with the Indians at Sandusky, and Johnson warned 
them not to permit the Americans to occupy their lands. It was 
advice which led to many difficulties, though Congress itself 
was not without resjDonsibilities for the long and harassing 
conflict which followed upon their occupation of the territory 
north of the Ohio, though it may be claimed that the results 
were worth the cost. " As to originating the Indian war," said 
Boudinot, ten years later, while president of that body, " so 
far from its being originated by Great Britain, I know that it 
originated in the false policy of Congress in 1783 ; I foretold 
it then, with all its consequences." 

It is necessary now to broaden our survey somewhat in order 
to understand better the real reasons which had induced Ilaldi- 
mand to devise a plan for retaining the j^osts, — a scheme into 
which the ministry easily entered. " Who are these mighty 
and clamorous Quebec merchants ? " exclaimed William Lee, 
when the news reached Brussels in February, 1783, that they 
were complaining of the peace. It was, in fact, these Cana- 
dian fur traders who saw in the concessions of the bounds 
which had been made in the treaty that their traffic could no 
longer be protected from the rivalry of the Americans. As 
Brissot reckoned, the annual sales in furs at London, coming 
from Canada, amounted for a few years succeeding the peace to 



238 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

about five million " livres tournois." '' It is from this consider- 
ation," he adds, " that the restitution of these forts is withheld." 
It was supposed at the time that one of the objects in prolong- 
ing British intrig-ues with the disaffected Vermonters, so as to 
detach them from the Union, was, as Hamilton expressed it, to 
" conduce to the security of Canada and to the preservation of 
the western posts." 

The British furthermore felt that these American rivals would 
find no longer any obstacles to their wish to open an inter- 
oceanic channel of trade. Carver tells us of a purpose which had 
been entertained by the Atlantic colonists, before the outbreak 
of the Revolution, to send an expedition under Colonel Rogers to- 
wards the Pacific, with the expectation of discovering the long- 
hidden Straits of Anian. The clash of arms had prevented the 
fulfillment. While the war was progressing, however, the English 
government had sent Captain Cook on his famous vo3^age, with 
instructions (1776) to make the Pacific coast at 45° north lati- 
tude, and to follow it north to 65°, in the hopes of finding that 
long-sought strait, for the discovery of which the British gov- 
ernment had recently offered a reward of X20,000. Little was 
then known of what Spain had already done on that same coast, 
for the Spanish flag had really been shown above 42° and up to 
50°, while Haceta had actually surmised the existence of the 
Columbia in 1775. 

When Cook, at Nootka Sound, saw the natives tremble at 
the noise of his guns, he was convinced that the Spaniai'ds had 
not already accustomed them to ordnance. He himself missed 
the Straits of Juan de la Fuca, but by recording the presence 
of the sea otter in those waters, he intimated a future industry 
of the region. His journals were not published till 1784-85 ; 
but a brief official report had already been made public, which 
John Ledyard, a Connecticut adventurer, used in preparing an 
account of the voyage, published at Hartford (1783) just at 
the close of the war. Ledyard had been a corporal of marines 
on Cook's ship. It was an indication of the interest, since the 
pressure of war had been I'emoved, which was taken in adven- 
turous traffic that Ledyard, eager to be the first to open trade 
on the northwest coast, now engaged the attention of Robert 
Morris in his plans. Ledyard was through life the sport of 
fi-eakish fortune, and no effort of his could mould the passing 



NORTH WEST COMPANY. 239 

encourag'ement even of Morris into practical shape, and lie 
went to Europe to enter new fields. Jefferson, then the Ameri- 
can minister at Paris, feeling- him to be " a person of ingenuity 
and information, but unfortunately of too much imagination," 
gently encouraged him, and Ledyard started to pass through 
Kussia and approach his goal by way of Kamschatka. Sir 
Joseph Banks, who had encountered him, had reached a high 
opinion of him, and thought him the only person fitted for such 
an exploration. His attempt failed, and it was left for some 
Boston merchants, a few years later, to accomplish by a voyage 
around Cape Horn the preemption of the valley of the Columbia, 
to become the goal of fur-trading competitors. 

An organized effort on the part of the British merchants had 
been made in 1783, just at the time when the retention of the 
posts was under consideration, by the formation of the North 
West or Canada Company. This trading organization almost 
immediately started up rival companies. Some bloody contests 
in the wilderness followed between their respective pioneers, 
which were ended only by their combining in 1787. Sepa- 
rately, and later jointly, the trading instincts of these associates 
pushed adventurers on the one hand up the Ottawa and so to 
the Peace River, and by the Mackenzie to the Arctic seas ; and 
on the other hand ultimately to and beyond the Rockies. By 
1785, they had begun to plant the British flag north of the 
Mississippi and upon the Missouri, as well as on the lesser 
of the upper affluents of the main river. The headquarters 
of these operations were maintained on that portage, between 
Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods, which the treaty 
had just made the line of boundary of the new Repul)lic, in 
ignorance of the real ultimate source of the Great Lakes in the 
springs of the river which enters Lake Superior at Duluth. A 
correct knowledge of geography would in reality have lost tlie 
United States a large part of the modern Minnesota. The 
traffic along this treaty route was conducted with a policy too 
like that which had enfeebled New France on the same soil, 
to insure an equal contest with the American settler in the later 
struggle for the possession of the Columbia valley. There was, 
however, on the part of some, a conception that American 
enterprise must seek its channel to the Pacific and the nations 
beyond not so nnich in the north, in conflict with the British, 
as in the south, in tlie rivalry of the S])anish. 



240 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

By the time that Carleton had withdrawn (November, 1783) 
the British troops from the Atlantic coast, it had become 
apparent to the British government, on the prompting of the 
merchants of Canada, that the conditions of the peace were 
far from favorable to that class of subjects. These trading 
combinations had of late been extending their operations from 
Detroit and Mackinac as centres, and their movements had 
conduced to the founding of Milwaukee and other new posts 
on and beyond the lakes. A later attempt to carry a larger 
vessel than had before been used on Lake Superior through 
the rapids at the Sault failed ; but with such craft as still 
sailed on those waters, the volume of the trade was large, and 
more than half of it was conducted by the merchants, through 
the posts which rightfully fell to the Americans by the treaty 
and were still in British hands. Hamilton put it more strongly, 
and said that by surrendering half the lakes, England quit- 
claimed a much larger part of the fur trade. Of the two thou- 
sand troops now holding Canada, less than eight hundred 
occupied the posts from Oswego westward, while less than four 
hundred held Lake Champlain and its apjiroaches. Preserving 
the posts by such a force as this, it was hoped to prevent the 
transfer of allegiance to the new Republic of the allied mer- 
chants, who might otherwise prefer to cling to their profits 
under the new Republic rather than to their birthright without 
them. It was, perhaps, safe to trust to the future for some 
vindication of a refusal to give up these stations, and the delay 
had convinced the traders that there was no immediate need of 
discovering other portages to the far West, as at first they had 
begun to do. Thus not only were mercantile interests to be 
served, but pride also, for there was a growing sense of mor- 
tification at the loss by the treaty of the principal carrying 
places, and the hope was entertained that some rectification of 
the boundary might yet be possible, through the failure of the 
American government to maintain itself, as was indeed later 
attempted by those who negotiated a treaty with Jay in 1794.- 
In arguing the question of priority of infractions, the British 
agents claimed that, until the ratifications of the treaty were 
exchanged in May, 1784, it was not incumbent on the British 
government to issue orders to evacuate the posts, and that such 
orders, if issued then, could not have reached Quebec before 



THE LOYALISTS. 241 

July, 1784, and that prior to this the American States had 
enacted hxws impeding the collection of the British debts. 

The fact is, however, that the British policy had been deter- 
mined even before the two governments had respectively rati- 
fied the definitive articles, for the day before Parliament con- 
firmed the treaty, Sydney had sent instructions to Haldimand, 
which reached him before June 14, 1784, to hold fast to the 
posts. It is thus certain that a month before the time came 
for relieving the British government of an imputation of un- 
fairness, this action was taken. If it was not an infraction of 
the treaty, then no enactment of the American States, anterior 
to the same date, could be held to be such. The facts are, that 
both sides were faithless, and practically by acts of even date ; 
nor was there any disposition on either side to undo prom})tly 
what had been done, when both sides were fully informed of 
the ratification. The motives in both cases were those of mer- 
cantile gain. 

The retention of the posts meant a profit to the English in 
excess of what would be gained by the possession of New York, 
and larger than any possible loss by repudiation of the debts. 

When Governor Clinton of New York, after Congress had 
ratified the treaty, demanded the evacuation of Oswego and 
Niagara by sending, in March, 1784, an agent who made the 
demand at Quebec in May, Haldimand, who did not, as it 
turned out, get word of the British ratification till the following 
August, would not recognize the right of a single State to make 
such a demand ; and as if to screen the real object of the posts' 
retention, intimated that the posts might not be surrendered at 
all, if the claims of the loyalists were not better respected. In 
August, that general was pointedly warned by his superiors 
to refrain from such explanations, and in November, he left his 
successor, St. Leger, instructions to observe the same warning. 

Jay, on September 6, 1785, when the loyalists w^ere moving 
into Ontario almost by thousands, notified John Adams that 
" some of the loyalists advise and warndy press the detention 
of the posts ; "' but when, in the latter part of 1785, Adams, then 
the American minister in London, first learned officially of the 
grounds for still holding the post, it was not ascribed to the 
neglect of the loyalists, but accounted a means of securing 
payment of the debts. 



242 THE INSECURTTY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

When Halclimaiid, in making- answer to the demand for the 
posts within the jurisdiction of New York, had referred to 
the loyalists, their fate had long been uppermost in his mind. 
By August, 1783, the pioneers o£ this expatriated body were 
beginning to reach Canada from New York in large numbers, 
to seek for new homes. Dunmore, while the negotiations for 
peace were going on, had proposed to settle these faithful sub- 
jects on the Mississippi, with a view of uising them from that 
base in continuing the war, just as Washington at one time had 
looked beyond the mountains to find an asylum if irretrievable 
disaster overtook him on the sea coast. But the peace had 
changed all. Franklin and his associates would not listen to 
any scheme of making the confederation responsible for the 
security of the loyalists, while there was no provision for which 
the English commissioners had contended so steadfastly, and if 
Jay was correct in his assurance to Livingston, December 12, 
1782, the British commissioners did not expect that restorations 
would be made to all that class. But their constancy had been 
of no avail, and the fortunes of the luckless Tories had been left 
to the uncertain consideration of the several States. There was 
nothing then left for the British commissioners to do but, in 
the choice of northern bounds which the Americans gave them, 
to select those which left the southern peninsula of Canada 
between Lakes Ontario and Huron in British hands. It was 
here, in a region which had been previously almost unoccupied, 
that it was now proposed to settle these unhappy refugees, 
though Haldimand, in November, 1783, recommended tliat a 
settlement be made near Cataraqui. Beside those who had 
come overland from New York in the summer of 1783, others 
left the same port by ship in the following autumn, to join such 
as had gone before. In the exodus it is supposed that about 
fifty thousand fled to Canada, and if the figures of the Tory, 
Judge Jones, can be trusted, there were one hundred thousand 
of these exiles who departed from New York to seek some 
asylum between March and November of that year (1783). 
Within a twelvemonth, there were certainly ten thousand of 
them who found their way to these upper Canadian lands, and 
some twenty thousand are known to have gone to the maritime 
provinces. 

These outcasts carried into Canada just the blood, hardihood, 



INDIAN RAIDS. 243 

and courage which were so needed in a new country. From 
their devotion to an undivided empire, they later assumed the 
name of United Empire Loyalists, to distinguish them from 
other settlers. They were a band that the States could ill 
afford to drive from their society. Not a few of the Americans 
then felt that these defeated countrymen could have been much 
better dealt with within the Republic than as refugees in a 
neighboring land, where they would be stirred by animosities. 
John Adams said of them: "At home, they would be impotent ; 
abroad, they are mischievous." No one felt it at the time more 
warmly than Patrick Henry, who urged that they should be 
encouraged to settle beyond the Appalachians. "■ Thej^ are," 
he said in a speech to the Assembly of Virginia, " an enterpris- 
ing, moneyed people, serviceable in taking off the surplus j^rod- 
ucts of our lands." He added that he had no fear that those 
who had " laid the proud British lion at their feet should now 
be afraid of his whelps." 

While what is now the Province of Ontario was comino' into 
being north of the lakes, there was a parallel movement going 
on south of Lake Erie, which was in the end to reach a far 
greater development. Before the tidings of peace had reached 
this more southei'u wilderness, and late in the winter of 1782- 
83, the frontiersmen and the Shawnees, with other confederated 
tribes, were still keeping up the hostile counter-movements 
which had long tracked that country with blood. Hamilton 
was reaching the conclusion that " the most just and humane 
way of removing them is by extending our settlements to their 
neighborhood." The Indians north of the Ohio had not re- 
ceived from Plaldimand the aid for which they had ho2)ed, for 
the policy of the British made at this time for peace. Never- 
theless, the old feuds, quite as madly followed by white as by 
savage, were not to be quelled, and they continued for some 
years. Judge Lines shows by figures tliat from 1783 to 1790, 
at least fifteen hundred frontiersmen were killed in these impla- 
cable raids, and tliat twenty thousand horses were stolen from 
one side or the other. General Irvine, who was watching these 
lawless actions from Fort Pitt, did his best to prevent settlers 
passing north of the Ohio, and he believed that nothing but the 
extirpation of the Indians or driving them beyond the lakes 
and the Mississip])i could ever render this region habitable. 



244 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

This was the condition of that country when American offi- 
cers, now looking- forward to a respite from war, were hoping 
to provide within it new homes for some part at least of a dis- 
banded army. This peaceful movement had begun in the spring 
of 1783, at Newburgh on the. Hudson, while Washington was 
awaiting the official promulgation of peace from Carleton in New 
York. The movement was at the start in the hands of Gener- 
als Huntington and Ruf us Putnam. On June 16, two hundred 
and eighty-eight officers of Washington's weary army, mainly 
New Englanders, petitioned Congress that the lands granted 
for military service in 1776 should be surveyed in what is now 
eastern Ohio, so that they could be occupied, and in time con- 
stitute a separate State of the Union. The lands to which they 
referred were east of a meridian which left the Ohio twenty- 
four miles west of the Scioto, and struck northward to the Mau- 
mee, whence the line followed that stream to Lake Erie. Put- 
nam bespoke Washington's influence in behalf of the petition, 
and suggested for the protection of the intended settlements 
that a chain of forts, twenty miles apart, should be placed on 
the western bounds of this tract. Washington transmitted to 
Congress the letter of the officers, with Putnam's letter and his 
own approval ; but nothing came of the appeal. 

Meanwhile, various projects had been broached looking to a 
more comprehensive appropriation of the region to civilized 
uses. Jefferson, with the instincts of a politician, was contem- 
plating the planting of a State on Lake Erie as a northern ap- 
pendage, which should be offset by a southern one on the Ohio. 
This was a revival of a project of Franklin some years before. 
Colonel Pickering, with a northern fervor, was thinking of a 
State to be set up at once, with a military spirit, and from 
which slavery should be excluded. On June 5, 1783, Colonel 
Bland of Virginia introduced in Congress an ordinance for 
erecting a territory north of the Ohio and dividing it into dis- 
tricts, with the ultimate purpose of making States of them, 
when their populations reached two thousand each. This ter- 
ritory was to be defended by frontier posts, and seminaries of 
learning were to be encouraged. 

While all these measures were thus still inchoate, unauthorized 
appro]>riations of the Indian country by reckless parties seemed 
likely to revive lingering hostilities. To avert this danger. Con- 



WASHINGTON AND THE WEST. 245 

gress, ill September, 1783, issued a proclamation against snch 
unlawful occupation of the Indian lands. This action did little 
to accomplish its object. We soon find McKee, in September, 
telling Sir John Johnson that the Sandusky Indians suspect 
the Americans of a design to encroach upon their tribal lands. 
Tlie steady flow of settlers across the Ohio did seem to point 
to such a purpose. Haldimand was confident that these provo- 
cations would end in a war, which would be ruinous to the sav- 
age. This meant that the retained posts would be deprived of 
a natural barrier ; and he accordingly urged Sir John Johnson 
to inculcate moderation upon the Indians. 

With tliese dangers impending, Washington, on September 7, 
1783, recommended in a letter the laying out of two new States 
in this western region. In language nearly following that of 
Wasliington, Congress, on October 15, in preparing the way 
for the ordinance of the next year, resolved to erect a distinct 
government north of the Ohio, but at the same time a commit- 
tee reported to Congress that the Indians were not prepared 
" to relinquish their territorial claim^ without further strug- 
gles," and recommended that emigrants be invited to enter the 
region east of a line drawn from the mouth of the Great Miami, 
up that stream, and down the Maumee to Lake Erie. The next 
month, November, 1783, Washington, in taking leave of the 
army, pointed to the west as promising a happy asylum for the 
veteran soldiers, " who, fond of domestic enjoyments, are seek- 
ing for personal independence." 

We need now to consider the existing state of the controversy 
over the title to these same lands. The steps for a western gov- 
ernment, both north and south of the Ohio, were doubtless in 
part owing to a wish to bring Virginia to an unrestricted ces- 
sion of her alleged or established rights to the country. There 
had been a memorial addressed to her Assembly in December, 
1783, asking to have Kentucky set up as a State, and in-ging 
tliat more States would add to the dignity of the Union. Re- 
ferring to this desire for self-government, it added, " A fool can 
put on his clothes better than a wise man can do it for him." 

When we consider the almost inexplicable language of the 
Virginia charter of 1609, it shows how state i)ride can obscure 
the mind to find George Mason i)ronouncing its definition of 



246 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

bounds " intelligible and admitting of natural and easy con- 
struction." However tliis may be, Virginia was now content to 
bold tbat, defining her limits in her constitution of 1776, and 
the confederation accepting her adherence, with full knowledge 
of that constitution, the other States were bound to recognize 
the confederation's declared j^rinciple, " that no State shall be 
deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States." 
This precluded the Union, it was held, making any demand for 
cessions. With these convictions, the Virginia Assembly had 
proved little inclined to brook any opposition, such as Tom 
Paine had made in his Piihlic Good, when he represented the 
United States at the peace becoming " heir to an extensive quan- 
tity of vacant land " in the west. The Assembly was so in- 
censed at Paine for such opinions that it stopped, at the second 
reading, a bill which had been introduced to compensate him 
for his services in the Revolution. 

Congress had already determined to accept cessions, as it had 
that of New York, without inquiring into title. A committee 
had been appointed to look into the terms of the cession pro- 
posed by Virginia, and on September 13, 1783, this committee 
had recommended that Congress should accept the Virginia ces- 
sion, if that State would withdraw the guarantee that Kentucky 
should be secured to her. This action was supplemented by an 
order establishing the undivided sovereignty of the United 
States over the west. There was little now for recalcitrant 
Virginia to do but to hasten her action. Edmund Randolph 
had seen the unfortunate predicament into which the State was 
thrusting herself, and some months before had written (March 
22, 1783) to Madison : " I imagine that the power of Congress 
to accept territory by treaty will not be denied. This will 
throw a plausibility against us [Virginia] which never before 
existed in the contest with Congress," — for the treaty of peace 
had, in fact, buttressed the exclusive claim of the United States. 
Jefferson, too, was becoming fearful lest Kentucky, applying to 
be received as a State, would be favored by Congress with 
bounds stretching east to the Alleghany. This, he felt, would 
deprive the parent State of that barrier of " uninhabitable 
lands " which she ought to have to separate her from a neigh- 
bor on the west, if Virginia maintained her bounds on the 
Kanawha. 



VIRGINIA'S CESSION. 247 

On October 19, 1783, Monroe had written to George Rogers 
Clark, urging that a new State shoukl be set up with the tradi- 
tion of Virginia, so that the okl commonwealth, now becoming 
aware of her isolation among her sisters, might have an efficient 
ally in the federal councils. The pressure had become so great, 
both within and without, that the next day, October 20, the 
Assembly authorized her delegates in Congress to make a deed 
of cession, without the objectionable reservations. This they 
did March 1, 1784. The instrument provided that "the neces- 
sary and reasonable expenses," later estimated at ,£220,000, 
connected with Clark's conquest and rule in the northwest, 
should be paid back to Virginia by the United States, if the 
claims were allowed before September 24, 1788. This had been 
consented to, not without apprehension that the charges would 
be inordinate, since few or no vouchers could be produced. 
This time-limit proved sufficient to protect all claims but Vigo's, 
for he was at the time beyond notice. 

The deed had also made reservation of bounty lands for 
soldiers. In December, 1778, and again in May, 1779, Vir- 
ginia had set aside for this purpose a tract in Kentucky, part of 
which was later found to lie within Noi-th Carolina ; and to 
make this loss good, in November, 1781, she had substituted a 
new tract bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Ten- 
nessee rivers and by the Cai'olina line. This embraced nearly 
10,000,000 acres, and one third was for the Continental line and 
two thirds for the state troops. If this did not prove suffi- 
cient, it was now provided by the deed of cession, in order to 
satisfy some objectors to a cession, that a tract north of the 
Ohio and between the Scioto and the Little Miami should be 
added. There proved to be no objection to these provisions, 
and Virginia congratulated herself that she had made in the 
cession " the most magnificent sacrifice upon the altar of public 
good which was, perhaps, ever recorded in the history of States," 
since by it she " chiefly paid the bounty claims of all the Conti- 
nental officers and soldiers of all the old States." This over- 
elated commonwealth had no a])prehension, apparently, that she 
had been making free with territory to which other States had 
as good a title as her own or even a better one, though all their 
titles were poor enough, it must be confessed, compared with 
that which the treaty of peace had given to the confederation. 



248 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

A renewed effort upon the part of the Vandalia Company to 
obtain the recognition of Congress, now that it had aeqnired 
this western region, failed of snccess. 

There was one way beyond her ostentatious sacrifice in which 
Virginia hoped to gain, and that was in the use of her rivers 
as channels of communication between the seaboard and this 
western country. Patrick Henry, in one of his speeches in the 
Virginia Asseml)ly, said : " Cast your eye, sir, over this exten- 
sive country, and see its soil intersected in every quarter with 
bold, navigable streams, flowing to the east and to the west, as 
if the finger of heaven were marking out the course of your 
settlements, inviting you to enterprise and pointing the way 
to wealth." There would be the greatest advantage to Vir- 
ginia, said Washington, " if she would open the avenues to the 
trade of that country, and embrace the present moment to 
establish it." 

Jefferson, in 1782, in speaking of the Mississippi as likely to 
be the route outward — but not inward — for the western coun- 
try, for heavy commodities, looked to the Potomac and the 
Hudson as lines of communication for the lighter burdens. He 
had, indeed, in his graphic description of the combined energies 
of the Potomac and Shenandoah in bursting through the barrier 
of the Blue Ridge, invested that tidal avenue of Virginia with 
popular interest. In comparing the rival routes to the coast 
from Cayahoga, on Lake Erie, Jefferson pointed out that to 
reach New York by the Mohawk and Hudson required eighty- 
five portages in eight hundred and twenty-five miles, while it 
was but four hundred and twenty-five miles to tide-water at 
Alexandria on the Potomac, with only two portages, and this 
route, he said at one time, "promises us almost a monopoly 
of the western and Indian trade." One of these portages 
was between the Cayahoga and the Beaver, where, as General 
Hand had informed Jefferson, a canal could be cut, connecting 
lagoons, in a flat country. The other interruption was between 
the Ohio valley and the Potomac, where a distance of fifteen 
to forty miles was to be overcome, " according to the trouble 

Note. — The opposite map is a section of tlie " Map of the western part of the territories be- 
longing to the United Statps," in George Iiiilay's Topor). Description, London, 1793. It sliows 
the different routes from Riclimond and Alexandria over the mountains. 



250 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

which shall be taken to approach the two navigations." Wash- 
ington, two years later, figured it more carefully, when he made 
the distance from Fort Pitt to Alexandria three hundred and 
four miles, including thirty-one miles of land carriage. This 
was by the Youghiogheny ; but if the course by the Mononga- 
hela and Cheat River was followed, the distance would be found 
to be three hundred and sixty-five miles, with a portage of 
twenty miles. 

Beside the rival plan of using the Hudson and the Mohawk, 
there was still the route from Philadelphia, which was a dis- 
tance of about three hundred and twenty miles, wholly by land. 
If water carriage be sought, this communication would be 
lengthened to four hundred and seventy miles, and would follow 
the course of the Schuylkill, Susquehanna, and Toby's Creek, 
the last an affluent of the Ohio. Charles Thomson, the sec- 
retary of Congress, was directing attention to two other Penn- 
sylvania channels. One was to leave Lake Erie at Presqu'Isle, 
and proceed by the Alleghany and one of its branches to a 
portage connecting with the Juniata. The other joined Ontario 
with the east branch of the Delaware, through the Iroquois 
country. Virginians were aware of the spirit of the Pennsyl- 
vanians, and Madison wrote to Jefferson that " the efforts of 
Pennsylvania for the western commerce did credit to her public 
councils. The commercial genius of Virginia is too much in its 
infancy to rival her example." 

No one took more interest than Washington in this question 
of western transit. He expressed himself not without appre- 
hension lest the new settlements on the Ohio, left alone, would 
find it for their commercial interests to bind themselves with 
their British neighbors on the north, and seek an exit for their 
produce through the St. Lawrence, or with the Spaniards on 
the west and south, and find an outlet in the Gulf of Mexico. 
This might happen, he felt, all the more easily because aliens 
ill considerable numbers, bound by no tradition or affinities of 
blood, were casting in their lots with the people of the remoter 
frontiers. It was with these fears, and seeking to avert them, 
that Washington turned to find some practicable communica- 
tion through the Appalachians. He could but be struck, he 
said, " with the immense diffusion and importance of the vast 



WASHINGTON AND THE WEST. 251 

inland navigation of the United States. Would to God," he 
exclaimed, " that we may have wisdom enough to improve 
them." Madison looked to this " beneficence of nature " as the 
sure protection for the evils of an over-extension of territory. 

Just after the close of the war, Washington had visited the 
battlefields along the upper Hudson and the Mohawk, and had 
been impressed with the capabilities of canalization in that 
direction, so as to form a western route. He described his 
course to the Chevalier de Chastellux as " up the Mohawk to 
Fort Schuyler (formerly Fort Stanwix)," whence he "crossed 
over to Wood Creek, which empties into Oneida Lake and 
affords the water communication with Ontario. I then [he 
adds] traversed the country to the head of the eastern branch 
of the Susquehanna, and viewed Lake Otsego and the portage 
between that lake and the Mohawk River at Canajoharie." 

Later, when once again in Virginia, in March, 1784, Wash- 
ington was urged by Jefferson to weigh against these New York 
routes the advantages of the course by the Potomac. In the fol- 
lowing September (1784) Washington, going west to see some 
of his own lands, — on the Kanawha and the Ohio, which he 
was yet to hold for ten years and more, — followed the upper 
Potomac, and made observations of the most accessible ways 
to reach the waters of the Ohio. On his return, he addressed 
from Mount Vernon (October 10, 1784) a letter to Benjamin 
Harrison, then governor of Virginia, in which he said : " It has 
long been my decided opinion that the shortest, easiest, and least 
expensive communication with the invaluable and extensive 
country back of us would be by one or both of the rivers of 
this State, which have their sources in the Appalachian Moun- 
tains. Nor am I singular in this opinion. Evans, in his Maj) 
and Analysis of the Middle Colonies., which, considering the 
early period in which they were given to the public, are done 
with amazing exactness, and Hutchins, since, in his Topograph- 
i((d Description of the Western Country., a good part of which 
is from actual surveys, are decidedly of the same sentiments, 
as indeed are all others who have had ojjportuuities and have 
been at the pains to investigate and consider the subject." 
Washington then goes on to point out that Detroit is farther 
from tide-water on the St. Lawrence by one hundred and sixty- 
eight miles, and on the Hudson by one hundred and seventy- 



252 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

six miles, than it is from a port for sea-going vessels on the 
Potomac. He proceeds to recommend the appointment of a 
commission to inspect the portages between the Potomac and 
the waters flowing into the Ohio, as well as to report upon a 
route by the James and the Great Kanawha, where the overland 
connection was thought to be about thirty miles. Jefferson had 
said of the Kanawha, as a suitable avenue for transit, that, 
risino- in North Carolina, it " traversed our whole latitude," and 
offered to every part of the State " a channel for navigation 
and commerce to the western country." 

Samuel AVharton, in 1770, had said of the Kanawha valley 
that barges could be easily moved to the falls. " Late discover- 
ies have proved," he adds, " that a wagon road may be made 
through the mountain which occasions the falls, and that by a 
portage of a few miles only a communication can be had be- 
tween the waters of the Great Kanawha and the James." 

Washington closed his letter to Harrison with a reference to 
a new proposition of propelling vessels by mechanism : "I con- 
sider Rumsey's discovery for working boats against the stream, 
by mechanical power principally, as not only a very fortunate 
invention for these States in . general, but as one of those cir- 
cumstances which have combined to render the present time 
favorable above all others for fixing, if we are disposed to avail 
ourselves of them, a large portion of the trade of the western 
country in the bosom of this State irrevocably." 

James Runisey, to whom Washington referred, was a machin- 
ist living on the upper Potomac, now a man of little more than 
forty years, who had exhibited to Washington a month before 
(September 6) a model of a double boat, which, by the applica- 
tion of mechanical power to setting poles, was intended " to 
make way against a rapid stream by the force of the same 
stream." This exhibition drew a certificate of approval from 
Washington (September 7), but Rumsey soon abandoned this 
device for another, as we shall later see. 

Note. — The opposite map is Wasliiiigton's sketcli (17S4) of the divide between the Potomac 
and the Youghiogheny, as engraved in U. S. Docs., XIX. Cong., 1st Session, House of Rep., Report, 
No. 228. Tlie committee making this i-eport pomt out that the road (dotted line) from Cumber- 
land to the Youghiogheny is almost precisely the route of the later Cumberland road, and tlie 

dotted line A B, across the Dividing Ridge, is almost identical with the recommendation of 

tlie government engineers (1820) for the course of the Cliesapeake and Ohio Canal. These corre- 
spondences the committee consider to be proofs of the insight of this " great and extraordinary 
man." 



254 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST^ 

This letter to Harrison was communicated to the Virginia 
Assembly, and led to the formation of the James River and 
Potomac Canal Company. By December, 1784, the project 
of such an organization. was well in hand, and Washington went 
to Annapolis to consult with the Assembly. Shortly afterwards 
(January 5, 1785) he wrote, from Mount Vernon, to General 
Knox that the bills which had been prepared both for the Vir- 
ginia and for the Maryland legislatures, in which each State had 
jjledged XI, 000 to the project, were drafted to his liking. The 
plan embraced two measures. One was to clear a road, say 
forty miles in length, from the north branch of the Potomac to 
Cheat River, an affluent of the Monongahela, — a route which 
Jefferson considered " the true door to the western commerce." 
The other scheme was to carry a road from Will's Creek, and 
connect wdth the Youghiogheny, another branch of the Monon- 
gahela. This, however, required the concurrence of Pennsyl- 
A^ania, and in December, 1784, the Virginia Assembly had asked 
of Pennsylvania the privilege of free transit for goods through 
that government. The Assembly of that State had discovered 
by a survey that a canal wholly through her own territory, and 
connecting Philadelphia with the Susquehanna, woidd require 
X200,000 for its construction. This large cost inspired Jefferson 
with the hope that the Youghiogheny route would prevail, and 
Washington was convinced that this last channel was '' the 
most direct route by which the fur and peltry of the lakes 
could be transported, while it is," as he added, " exceedingly 
convenient to the people who inhabit the Ohio (or Alleghany) 
above Fort Pitt." In anticipation of this route being selected, 
Brownsville was, in the spring of 1785, regularly laid out on the 
Monongahela, near Red Stone Old Fort, which had for some 
years become the usual starting-point for boats carrying emi- 
grants down the Ohio to Kentucky, and around wliich landing- 
place there had grown up a settlement of boat-builders and of 
traders in supplies. 

A route for which surveys by the new bill were also ordered, 
and which was more satisfactory to the mass of tide-water Vir- 
ginians, was by the James River, whence a short portage, say 
twenty-five or thirty miles, conducted to New River, and then to 
the Kanawha below its falls, and finally to the Ohio. It was 
on this route that Washington earlier secured some lands, and 



^'^ ..^^'^^^ 




[The above map is from a MS. map by HeckeweWer (ITOC), reproiliiced in tlie Western Reserve 
Hht. Soc. Tract. No. 64 (1884). It shows the valleys of Muskingum aud Cayahoga, and the In- 
dian paths.] 



256 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

Albert Gallatin was at this time surveying some adjacent prop- 
erty on the Kanawha for himself. 

When these plans were well devised, Washington, on Novem- 
ber 30, 1785, wrote to Madison : " It appears to me that no 
country in the universe is better calculated to derive benefit 
from inland navigation than this is ; and certain I am that the 
conveniences to the citizens generally, wliich will be opened 
thereby, will be found to exceed the most sanguine expecta- 
tion." Very likely this letter expresses exactly the opinions 
which Washington in the previous spring had disclosed to the 
commissioners of Maryland and Virginia, when, after their 
conferences at Alexandria in the interests of intercolonial trade, 
they had accepted an invitation to Mount Vernon, and spent 
several days with its owner, — a meeting that proved one of the 
preliminary steps to the federal convention at a later day. 

Whatever the favorite route from tide-water, it was neces- 
sary, when once the Ohio basin was reached, to discover the 
best avenue to the lakes. On this point Washington had been 
actively seeking information. He had applied to Richard 
Butler, tlien Superintendent of Indian Affairs, particularly in 
reference to a connection which Jefferson had recommended 
between the Muskingum and the Cayahoga, so as to reach Lake 
Erie at the modern Cleveland. Later, in 1786, Congress made 
all the portages between the lakes and the Ohio basin common 
highways, — a pi-ovision that was the next year embodied in the 
ordinance of 1787. At a still later day (January, 1788), the 
New York portage by Lake Chautauqua was, at the instance of 
General Irvine, made the subject of other action. 

While these physical difficulties were luider consideration, it 
was clear to Washington's mind that, to develop any such busi- 
ness as these rival routes contemplated, it was necessary not 
only that a large immigration should be sent beyond the moun- 
tains, but that it should be directed in the right way. It was 
apparent that for the present the contemplated channels of 
trade might suffice and serve to keep the nascent common- 
wealths of the west in touch with the older communities ; but 
Washington did not disguise his continued apprehension that 
" whenever the new States became so populous and so ex- 
tended to the westward as really to need the Mississippi, 
there could be no power to dei)rive them of its use." There 



CANAL COMPANY. 257 

was, particularly among the Virginians, a growing conviction 
that this Mississippi question was a burning one, and its solu- 
tion could not be far ahead. It was a necessary outgrowth of 
that caballing of Vergennes and Spain which Jay andjiis asso- 
ciates, in 1782, had so boldly and dexterously overcome. France 
was still as treacherous and Spain was as weakly obstinate as 
they had been then. In the sunnner of 1784, Madison had 
met Lafayette at Baltimore, and endeavored to make him com- 
prehend that France needed, in order to preserve the friendship 
of the United States, to persuade Spain to give up her exclu- 
sive pretensions to the Mississippi. " Spain is such a fool that 
allowances must be made," said Lafayette. It was only a ques- 
tion how long she could afford to be a fool, while her unfriend- 
liness was not altogether distasteful to Washington, since it 
helped his ulterior projects about the western connections of 
Virginia. 

After the James River and Potomac Canal Company had been 
formed, Washington was induced to become its first president. 
He remained long enough in control of it to take a broad view 
of its future develo]imeftt. Just after he had resigned his pres- 
idency, and was about to assmne the executive chair under the 
Federal Constitution, he congratulated Jefferson that the recent 
surveys had shown the sources of the Ohio and Potomac nearer 
than was supposed, and two or three boats had lately passed 
from Fort Cumberland to Great Falls, nine miles above tide- 
water, showing what progress had been made in opening the 
Potomac. 

In appreciation of the value to the company of his services, 
the Virginia Assembly made Washington a considerable sharer 
in its stock. He hesitated long about embarrassing his action 
by accepting such a gratuity, and was persuaded to do so only 
by the urgent representations of Patrick Henry. He reserved, 
however, the right to make its advantages ultimately accrue to 
tlie public, as later under his will was provided. 

As to the political needs of the country thus to be reached 
and developed, there had been movements in Congress looking 
to the formation of States out of it, while the war was still in 
progress. It had been proposed, in 1780, to constitute States 
of dimensions not more than one hundred or one hundred and 



258 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

fifty miles square. Washington had been urging James Duane 
to action in this matter, and on October 15 Congress resolved 
on some step towards setting up such Western States, and Jeffer- 
son was made the chairman of a committee to consider the ques- 
tion. On March 1, 1784, he reported an ordinance which gave 
to the proposed States some such area as had been suggested in 
1780. His original plan, however, was more comprehensive than 
an organization of the northwestern region merely, for he de- 
sired, with the consent of Virginia and the other Southern States, 
to include also their over-hill country, and to exclude slavery 
therefrom after the year 1800. By this plan there could be 
laid out fourteen States south of the 45th parallel and north of 
the 31st. He proposed to give two degrees of latitude to each 
State in horizontal tiers. The most westerly north and south 
column would have six States below the 43d parallel and one 
above, lying west of Lake Michigan, and a second still farther 
north, stretching to the bounds of Canada. Those below the 
43d would be bounded on the east by a meridian cutting the 
falls of the Ohio. Near this point Louisville was already a 
town of a hundred motley houses, including the only variety 
store in the Ohio valley, kept in stock by the traders who passed 
down the river from Pittsburg. North of the 43d parallel, and 
lying between Lakes Michigan and Huron, was another State, 
with four other States lying directly south, and extending to 
the 35th parallel. South of that the country east of the me- 
ridian already named was to be joined to South Carolina and 
Georgia. The eastern boundary of this second column of States 
was to be a meridian cutting the mouth of the Kanawha. This 
left an irregular piece of territory lying east of this last me- 
ridian, and inclosed by it, by the Alleghany River, by the west- 
ern bounds of Pennsylvania, and by Lake Erie, which was to 
make an additional State. By this division the Ohio bisected 
the two States lying between the 37th and 39tli parallels. It 
was provided that these States could become members of the 
confederation as they successively attained a population equal 
to the smallest of the original States. A series of curious and 
pedantic names, rather ludicrously mixed with more faiuiliar 

Note. — The opposite map is a section of a " Carte Generate des Etats-Uuis " in Crevecoeur's 
Lcltiv's (Vun Cii//iva/p)tr, Paris, 1787. It sliows tlie proposed divisions of the western territory 
under Jefferson's ordinance of 1784. Frankland is misplaced. 



l-a^ScjnAini 




260 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

appellations, was given to the group. The most northern of 
all was named Sylvania. Michigania and Chersonesus lay 
respectively west and east of Lake Michigan. Just south of 
these lay Assenisipia and Metropotamia ; then came in the next 
tier lUinoia and Saratoga ; while Polypotamia embraced the 
country holding the various rivers that joined the Ohio in its 
lower course, and Pelisipia lay to the east of the last named, 
and mainly south of the Ohio. The State of irregular outline 
was to be called Washington. 

The ordiufflice was recommitted, somewhat modified, again 
reported March 22, and was later by amendment subjected to 
other changes. Jefferson's uncouth names were abandoned. 
The Ohio, instead of the 39th parallel, was made the boundary 
between the States which had earlier been called Saratoga and 
Pelisipia. The territory north of 45° up to 49° was added to 
what Jefferson had called Michigania. The clause abolishing 
slavery after 1800 was removed. The ordinance thus reformed 
was adopted on April 23, 1784. The essential feature of the 
new law was that the States could adopt constitutions like that 
of any of the original States, and when they reached a popula- 
tion of 20,000, they could be admitted to Congress by delegates, 
and they could have the right to vote when a census showed 
their State to have a population equal to the smallest of the 
old States. All provisions were in the nature of a compact 
between the new communities and the old. 

Though an act of Congress had thus indicated the future of the 
northwest, there was little disposition among the people to give it 
force, and it remained practically a dead letter for the next three 
years. During this interval tentative efforts were made from 
time to time to improve the scheme. Washington objected to 
the ordinance as being too ambitious. He thought a plan of 
" jDrogressive seating," by which States should be called one after 
another into being, as population demanded, would have been 
wiser. There was a feeling among the frontiersmen in favor of 
natural boundaries rather than for astronomical ones. This 
objection was met by Pickering : " This will make some of the 
States too large, and in many of them throw the extremes at 
such unequal distances from the centres of government as must 
prove extremely inconvenient." This terminal question took 
a definite issue when, in January, 1785, the settlers west of the 



OHIO SURVEYS. 261 

Alleglianies sent a memorial to Congress, asking that a sepa- 
rate government should be set up with bounds upon the Kana- 
wha and Tennessee rivers ; but the movement was prematui-e. 

Pickering now developed an active agency in two directions. 
It is probable that he incited Rufus King to move, on March 
16, 1785, that the ordinance of April 23, 1784, should be 
amended so as to abolish slavery after 1800. The proposition 
was referred to a committee, who reported on April 6, but the 
matter dropped without definite action. 

At the same time (March 16, 1785), Jefferson's plan for a 
survey of the western territory was referred to a grand connuit- 
tee. Pickering had, at the beginning of that month, sent a plan 
to Gerry, in which he deprecated the Virginia habit of scram- 
bling for allotments and of setting up " tomahawk claims," 
which had prevailed in the Kentucky region, and wliicli had 
proved an incentive to Indian outbreaks. He outlined instead 
a scheme of township surveys, with indications of the quality 
of the lands, in order that there might be a more systematic 
assignment of rights by constituted authority. On April 12, 
1785, the grand committee, of which Grayson was chairman, 
reported an ordinance of such a character, which provided also 
that a section of a square mile should be reserved in each town- 
ship for the support of religion, and another for schools. The 
educational clause alone was retained. The township was made 
six miles square ; and five ranges of townships were to be sur- 
veyed between the Ohio and Lake Erie, beginning west of the 
Pennsylvania line. The district between the Scioto and the 
Little Miami was reserved to meet the bounties due the troops 
who took part in Clark's campaign. On April 26, an observer 
wrote to Gerry that Congress had spent a month on tlie prob- 
lem, while Virginia made many difficulties. " The Eastern 
States,"' he added, " are for actual surveys and sale by town- 
ships ; the Southern States are for indiscriminate locations.'" 
On May 20, 1785, the reported plan was adopted as in effect an 
adjunct of the ordinance of 1784, and Grayson wrote to Wash- 
ington that it was the best that under existing circumstances 
could be procured. 

It was evidently the purpose of Congress, in this ordinance 
of May 20, to follow Washington's advice and push westward 
by stages, and make settlements by " compact and progressive 



262 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

settlements." The expansive tendency had, moi-eover, earned 
Jay's reprobation. " The rage for separation and new States," 
he wrote to John Adams, October 14, 1785, ^ is mischievous ; 
it will, unless checked, scatter our resources and in every view 
enfeeble the Union." What territorial limits to give the new 
States became an inherent element of any scheme. Monroe, 
who was interested, journeyed west on a tour of observation. 
He found the discomforts of the way fatiguing, and doubtless 
looked upon the country in a spirit which was influenced by 
his irksome experiences. He saw and heard enough about the 
country to believe that the stories of the inordinate fertility of 
the soil were the work of land speculators. Nevertheless, there 
was, as Jay expressed it, " a rage for emigrating to the western 
country," and the Continental Land Office was thronged with 
those seeking " to plant the seeds of a great people beyond the 
mountains." In Monroe's judgment, no more than five States 
could be profitably laid out where Jefferson had counted on 
l)erhaps double that number. When Monroe returned, a move- 
ment was vigorously made in Congress to discredit the astro- 
nomical bounds and substitute natural ones, and to reduce the 
number of States to be laid out to three or five. It was neces- 
sary, in the first instance, that the conditions of the cessions 
of Virginia and Massachusetts — later explained — should be 
made to conform to the new disposition of States, and this was 
in due time accomplished. Grayson now proposed a division 
like this : An east and west line should be drawn from the 
western bounds of Pennsylvania so as to touch the southern 
head of Lake Michigan. This gave one State in the lower 
Michigan peninsula and another west of that lake, extending 
north to 49°, and bounded west by the Mississippi. Between 
the Ohio and the east and west line there were to be three 
States, to complete the five, and the lines to separate them 
were to be meridians cutting the mouths of the Great Miami 
and the Wabash. This last line was later changed, so that the 
division followed the Wabash north till it reached Vincennes, 
and then went due north by the river and by a meridian. 

Jefferson saw danger in this smaller number of States. He 
would have them of about thirty thousand square miles each, 
and not one hundred and sixty thousand. It was like the differ- 
ence between Virginia, east of the mountains, and a conunon- 



MASSACHUSETTS CESSION. 263 

wealth three times as hirge, as he contended. He feared that 
the people in such large States could not be kept together, and 
that they would very likely break up their territory. In this 
way they might, in part at least, withdraw to join either the 
British or the Spanish. He wrote to Madison (December, 
1786) that he thought this policy of making large States " re- 
versed the natural order of things." He then reverted again 
to the chance of distractions arising from the disposition of 
Spain to monopolize the Mississi})pi, and said that the prospect 
gave him " serious apprehension of the severance of the eastern 
and western parts of our confederacy. A forced connection 
[with the west] is neither our interest nor within our power." 

Jeiferson was not alone certainly in perceiving trouble ahead 
in this direction, but there were measures more pressing which 
must be put in train, before any congressional action regulat- 
ing the civic government of the northwest could be satisfac- 
torily applied. The first of these was to complete the release 
of territorial claims, urged by some of tlie seaboard States ; 
and the other was to quiet the Indian title sufficiently, at least, 
to open areas to settlement. It is necessary now to consider 
these two measures. 

The cessions of New York and Virginia had thrown the 
further responsibility upon Massachusetts and Connecticut. 
Connecticut was still governed under lier original charter, 
which gave her a sea-to-sea extension. Massachusetts had had 
a similar charter taken from her by the king in council : but 
she did not recognize the power of the monarch, and now with 
a new and revolutionary constitution, she stood for her original 
territorial rights. 

The first charter of Massachusetts placed her northern 
bounds on a parallel three miles north of the Merrimac River 
on any part of it. In early days she had contended that this 
meant three miles north of that river's source in Lake Win- 
nipiseogee, while New Hampshire was willing to accept a 
line which started west three miles north of its mouth. The 
dispute culminated at a time when Massachusetts was little 
inclined to favor the royal prerogative. The Privy Council, 
being called upon to arbitrate, punished the older colony by 
curving the line from a point on the coast three miles north of 



264 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

the mouth of the Merrimac, so that it ran parallel to that river 
till it reached its southernmost bend, from which point it was 
carried due west, — as defined in the maps of to-day. Massa- 
chusetts, in recognizing, at that time, this paramount authority 
of the sovereign as settling her bounds east of the Hudson, 
argued that west of that river, beyond the rights acquired by 
New York, — which were allowed to extend to the upper 
waters of the Delaware, — her independence secured her orig- 
inal rights so far as they had been untouched. Therefore she 
claimed that her rights were unimpaired in the northwest, be- 
tween the latitude of Lake Winnipiseogee and a continuation 
of her bounds on Connecticut. This gave a belt westward, 
eighty miles wide, north of 42° 2'. These limits gave Massa- 
chusetts pretensions to the larger part of western New York, — 
wherein she was a rival claimant with New York, — and the 
southern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin, where Virginia, 
holding rival claims, had already released them. The Mohawk 
basin was unsettled beyond Cherry Valley, at the headwaters 
of the Susquehanna, and German Flats. New York, while 
claiming jurisdiction in the country farther west than the Mo- 
hawk, particularly in the valley of the Genesee, after having, 
for a year or two before, presumed to sell the lands which were 
in dispute, entered into an agreement with Massachusetts made 
at Hartford, December 12, 1786, by which she recognized the 
fee of that region west of Seneca Lake to be in Massachusetts, 
but subject to the native title. This arrangement covered six 
million acres, which Simeon de Witt was to survey and plot 
in a map, subsequently published in 1802. Massachusetts sold 
these lands in 1788 to Phelps and Gorham, who had sought in 
vain to enlist the aid of Rufus King in the j)urchase, but that 
portion of it, about four million acres, west of the Genesee, 
later reverted to Massachusetts, and was again sold by her to 
Robert Morris. He retained what was known as the Morris 
Reserve, and sold the rest to the Holland Land Company. It 
is not necessary to go into details about tliis particular part 
of the western claims of Massachusetts. When her western 
bounds — of the State proper — had been fixed in 1773 by a 
line, roughly parallel to the Hudson and say twenty miles east 
of it, Thomas Hutchinson, one of her connnissioners, had for- 
tunately insisted that the acceptance of that line was without 



CONNECTICUT CESSION. 265 

prejudice to the claims of Massachusetts farther west, so that 
this State was not now debarred from claiming in the far West. 
This was but one of the obligations under which Massachusetts 
lay to her later exiled governor, one of the loyalists who was 
best provided for, in England. AVhat Hutchinson saved for 
Massachusetts east of Niagara was not indeed to be yielded to 
the public domain ; but this was not the case with the fifty-four 
thousand square miles in Micliigan and beyond, whose fee and 
jurisdiction she ceded to Congress by an act of April 19, 1785. 
This was prior, as we have seen, to the movement for reducing 
the number of States proposed to be set up in the northwest. 

To remove the last bar to a clear title to this public domain, 
there was now nothing left but for Connecticut to do what 
Massachusetts had done, in regard to a strip west of Pennsyl- 
vania and south of Lake Erie and of the Massachusetts cession, 
or between 41° and 42° 2', and stretching to the Mississippi. 
This claim covered about forty thousand square miles. In 
assertion of her charter rights. Governor Trumbull of Connecti- 
cut, on November 15, 1783, had, by proclamation, warned all 
intruders off. Connecticut had had a long and, at times, some- 
what ferocious quarrel with Pennsylvania over a similar strip 
whicdi cut off a northern segment of the territory of William 
Penn's charter, and only a year before (1782) it had been 
settled by the intervention of Congress, which gave no reasons, 
but upheld the claim of Pennsylvania. So what was left for 
Connecticut to contribute was this same strip further westward, 
where it covered what is now a part of the States of Ohio, Indi- 
ana, and Illinois. Within it were the sites where Cleveland 
was to be founded a few years afterwards in 1791, and Toledo 
and Chicago at a later day. This was the cession which Con- 
necticut made, September 14, 1786. She imposed a condition, 
however, which, but for her promise to settle the country on 
Lake Erie, might have failed of acceptance in Congress. This 
was reserving a section along Lake Erie in the present State of 
Ohio, which is still known as the Western Reserve ; and whose 
settlement, soon to follow, realized the liope of Franklin, twenty 
years befoi-e, of a barrier State in that position. After a 
struggle in Congress, in which there was nuich opposition to 
any recognition of the Connecticut's charter rights in this res- 



266 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

ervatioii, the act of cession was accepted on May 26. It was 
supposed that the reservation as defined included about six 
million acres, but it proved to contain only about three million 
two hundred and fifty thousand acres, when it was finally 
surrendered to the United States in 1800. This Connecticut 
cession, barring what was temporarily withheld with some 
doubt as to the retention of jurisdiction with the fee, compacted 
the great public domain of the northwest. There was still a 
small unclaimed area on Lake Erie. The long controversy over 
the western boundary of Pennsylvania had been closed in 1784 
by running her southern line due west from the Delaware for 
five degrees, when it turned at right angles and was extended 
north to 42°. This point proved to be contiguous to Lake 
Erie, but there were five or six miles of lake shore east of it that 
did not belong to New York, since the western bounds of that 
State had recently been run by Andrew Ellicott on a meridian 
twenty miles west of the most westerly point on the banks of 
the Niagara River. Thus a bit of territory nearly triangular 
in shape and known as the " Erie triangle," measuring some- 
thing over two hundred thousand acres, was considered to be 
a part of the public domain, not embraced in the ordinances 
of 1784, or in the later one of 1787. In 1788, the United 
States extinguished the Indian title in it for £1,200 and then 
sold it to Pennsylvania, by which that State secured on the 
lake the old port of Presqu'Isle, now the city of Erie. 

Meanwhile, before the cession of Connecticut had been made, 
Congress had in connection with the ordinance of May 20, 
1785, created the office of Geographer of the United States, 
electing to that position Thomas Hutchins, who had been 
Bouquet's engineer in a campaign in this western country 
twenty years before. After the Connecticut Reserve had been 
made, Hutchins was directed to survey seven, instead of five, 
longitudinal ranges of townships, north of the Ohio, west of 
Pennsylvania, and south of the Reserve. 

This plan of a rectangular survey was first suggested in the 
repoi't of a committee, of which Jefferson was chairman, on 
May 7, 1784, and it was in accordance with his distrust of 
rivers and ridges as suitable lines of demarcation. It has been 
suggested that the hint of such a survey came from Dutch 



THE INDIAN TITLE. 267 

practice in a country too flat for natural divides. What Hutch- 
ins now undertook to do constituted the first systematic survey 
west of the mountains, and was known as the Seven Ranges. 
To start it, a " geographer's line," so called, was run due west 
for forty-two miles from a point where the bounds of Penn- 
sylvania crossed the Ohio to a meridian that struck the Ohio a 
few miles above Marietta, and formed the western bounds of 
nineteen towns in the most western of the ranges. A post was 
set at each mile, and every six miles a spot was indicated as a 
township corner, through which a meridian line was run to the 
Ohio and to the line of the Reserve (41°), cut by other east 
and west lines at regular distances of six miles. In this way 
the lines were marked, at first, without any very nice regard to 
the magnetic variation, though Rufus King had tried in Con- 
gress to insure a record of it. Another difficulty was soon pointed 
out by Pickering and others, which was that there was no rec- 
ognition of the converging of the meridian going north. " A 
difference of six hundred yards in ten miles must surely pro- 
duce material eri'ors," said Pickering. This was remedied at 
a later period (May 10, 1800, Act of Congress) by running 
other base lines occasionally, with new six-mile subdivisions. 

While the work was going on, it was necessary sometimes to 
protect the surveyors from inroads of the savages. Tupper 
had been engaged with Ilutchins, and it was his report on the 
country to Putnam that helped start the later Ohio Company. 
Ilutchins did not live to complete the work, and v,hen he died 
in 1788, at Pittsburg, the charge of the survey was assumed by 
the treasury. Hutchins's work has given him fame, as by it he 
introduced that universal square plotting of the public lands 
which makes the map of our Western States and Territories 
so unattractive to an eye accustomed to the diversity of geo- 
graphical boundaries. 

The quieting of the Indian title has been mentioned as the 
other necessary preliminary to the successful settlement of these 
western lands. The red man had first recognized in 1784, in 
the treaty of Fort Stanwix, the authority of the new Republic ; 
and this meant, in an enforced dealing with the Indians, a 
more extensive governmental relation than had been main- 
tained with them in the past. The confederation had of late 



268 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

years spent annually less than $2,500 in the Indian problem, 
the greater cost devolving upon individual States. In 1784, 
the cost, to the extent of 'f4,500, fell upon the United States. 

It was held in later years by Chief Justice Marshall that a 
European nation making discovery of a territory had the sole 
right of extinguishing the Indian title within that territory, 
and that individual bargains with Indians for land were of no 
binding effect. This principle had been established by Con- 
gress in 1781. 

The earlier treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, had, according 
to the claim of the Indians, considered the Ohio as the bound- 
ary between them and the whites ; and recognizing this, it now 
devolved upon Congress to take steps to enlarge the territory 
open to settlement. In March, 1784, that body deemed it 
desirable that the Indian title should be quieted on the hither 
side of the meridian of the falls of the Ohio. To do this, it was 
necessary to bring the tribes to treaty stipulations, and some- 
what unadvisedly it was determined to enter into pacts, tribe 
by tribe, rather than to deal with them in a mass. There were 
two obstacles in sight. One was the difficulty of finding the 
money necessary for the presents required in a successful agree- 
ment with the savages. The other was the obstinacy with 
which the Indians, in some part at least, and under British 
instigation, were opposed to abandoning the Ohio limits. 

It was politic to begin at the immediate frontiers. Richard 
Butler, with whom Washington had been consulting about the 
Ohio portages, was in October, 1784, joined in a commission 
with Oliver Wolcott and Arthur Lee, to whom representatives 
of Pennsylvania should be added, to meet the New York In- 
dians at Fort Stanwix, in order to extinguish their title to lands 
lying north and west of the Ohio, and within the limits of 
Pennsylvania and New York. A treaty was made, and by it 
the Iroquois, who had been pressing west along the southern 
shores of Lake Erie, were in fact shut out from any further 
advance in that direction. The pretensions of the Six Nations 
to make sale of this territory angered the western tribes, who 
claimed it as within their own patrimony. This rendered it 
necessary to placate those discontents. 

Fort Mcintosh had fallen into disrepair since 1783, and was 
now refitted ; and here, on January 21, 1785, the American 



INDIAN EESERVATION. 



2G9 



commissioners, Isaac Lane, George Rogers Clark, and Samuel 
n. Parsons, met representatives of the Wyandots, Delawares, 
Chippewas, and Ottawas. It was now agTced for a satisfactory 
consideration that a region in the northwest of the present 
State of Ohio should remain inviolably in the Indian posses- 
sion, except that the whites should be allowed tracts, six miles 
square, about any military post which was within the territory. 
The region thus reserved stretched on Lake Erie from Caya- 






FORT McINTOSH. 

[After a plate in T/ie Columbian IMcgnzine, January, 1790. See the same sketch revamped in 
Pennsylvania Archives, second series, vol. xiv.] 

hoga to the Maumee. Its easterly line ran by the Cayahoga 
and the Tuscarawas to near Fort Lawrence. The southern line 
extended thence to the portage connecting the Miami and the 
Maumee, and by the latter sti-eam the line extended to the lake. 
Gerr}^ on February 25, 1785, writing from New York, informed 
Jefferson that Arthur Lee had just returned from the Indian 
countr3% and had reported that the new treaty had secured 
thirty million acres for coming settlements. There were all 
the while opposing views as to the desirability of acquiring 
the Indian title beyond the Miami, and so to the Mississippi. 



270 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

Pickering was among tliose who opposed any such movement 
as opening the lands to " lawless emigrants," who were rather 
incited than restrained by any prohibitory enactments. On the 
other hand, there were those who contended that such pui'chases 
were necessary to give the color of right to "lawless emigra- 
tion," and so prevent an Indian war. 

There was another pressing difficulty, and that was the 
invasion of these lands, north of the Ohio, by irresponsible 
land-grabbers. In January, 1785, Governor Henry had warned 
all intruders of the dangers they incurred. Congress was deter- 
mined to prevent the occupation of the acquired lands till they 
had been surveyed. On January 24, 1785, General Harmar, 
now in command on the Ohio, had been instructed to drive 
out all squatters, and he did not hesitate to brand them as 
" banditti, whose actions were a disgrace to human nature." 
In March, he sent Ensign Armstrong along the north bank of 
the Ohio as far as a point opposite Wheeling, to dispossess the 
intruders, and this officer reported that he had heard of many 
hundred more, as far west as the Miami. The work was fol- 
lowed up by a proclamation from Harmar on April 2, 1785 ; 
and by vigilant action that general succeeded in preventing a 
combination of the adventurers, for the purpose of resisting 
under some organized form of government. By May 1, Har- 
mar reported that the cabins of such squatters had been burned. 

The immigration by the Ohio, which had now been going 
on for some years, was estimated at the close of 1785 to have 
carried something like fifty thousand souls west of Pittsburg, 
and there was enough community of interest among them, 
English, Scotch, Irish, and German, to warrant in the summer 
of 1786 the setting up of the first newspaper west of the 
Alleghanies, the Pitt&hurg Gazette. The stream of emigrants, 
aggregating year by year from five to twenty thousand, and 
sometimes in a twelvemonth making a procession of a thousand 
boats, had been stranded mainly on the Kentucky side of the 
river, but the lateral valleys on the north bank had received no 
incoiisiderable numbers, as Armstrong was now reporting. 

While these measures were in progress, it had occurred to 
the philanthropic Countess of Huntingdon (February, 1785) to 
send a company of English colonists to settle on lands adjacent 



SURVEY'S AND SETTLEMENTS. 271 

to the Indians, in order to influence the savage character tlirouoh 
Christian neighbors, and so bring them to civilized ways. 
There was no doubt that a spirit in the white man, different 
from that prevailing among the wild adventurers of the west, 
was needed on the frontiers ; but there was a fear that colonists 
direct from English homes would feel more sympathy with the 
English of the retained posts than with the neighboring bush- 
rangers, and that accordingly the philanthropic experiment was 
too dangerous for trial. So nothing came of it. 

All these movements did not escape the notice of Simon 
Girty and other emissaries of the British at Detroit. Very 
likely it was by the instigation of such men that a disaffected 
remnant of the Shawnees, Mingoes, and Delawares, and a few 
Cherokees, got together in council on May 18, 1785, and gave 
warning through one John Crawford, a Virginian whom they 
held, that resistance would be made to encroachments north of 
the Ohio, if such were persisted in. Ten days later (May 29), 
we fuid McKee informino' Sir John Johnson of the orowino- 
discontent of the tribes, and the pressure which those along the 
Wabash were exerting on the easterly Indians to combine in 
order to enforce their rights. 

In Auoust, an Indian council at Niagara, and the move- 
ments of the autumn months, showed that it was difficult to 
insure quiet, esj^ecially as there were rumors of an American 
attack on Detroit. Such had been the uncertain condition 
when, on June 15, 1785, Congress, to give higher authority to 
Harmar's action, proclaimed that the sui'veys of the new lands 
must be completed before settlement could be allowed. It was 
felt by Hamilton and others that the proclamation was likely 
to be futile, and that the territory must inevitably become the 
theatre of a savage war, and in April, militia had been called 
out for three years' service on the frontiers. There were fore- 
boding symptoms in the active agencies which Simon Girt}'^ 
and Joseph Brant were exerting along the frontier. As an 
Iroquois chieftain. Brant had felt deeply the manner in which 
his tribesmen had been driven from their old homes and forced 
to find hunting-grounds on Canadian soil, and had turned a 
deaf ear to Monroe's entreaty to join the American rather than 
the British interests. Nothing had more perjdexed Haldimand 
than making suitable provision for these old allies of the British. 



272 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

Despite their antipathy to the Americans, Brant and his coun- 
trymen were not a little incensed, moreover, in seeing what 
measures the British Parliament had taken to provide for the 
losses of the loyalists, while the losses of his own people had 
been left without corresponding relief. He was threatening 
during the summer (1785) to proceed to England and lodge 
his complaint with the ministry, while Haldimand tried to 
assuage his resentment. 

In the autumn (1785), the commissioners, of whom General 
Robert Howe was now one, began to pi-epare for a further treaty 
to carry out the wishes of Congress expressed the preceding- 
June. Monroe accompanied them " for private considerations," 
as it was said. Captain Doughty, stationed at Fort Mcintosh, 
was persuaded that a more generous treatment of the Indians 
would be better, and recommended to the secretary of war a 
greater outlay in gifts. Jay, as a looker-on at the centre of 
government, was far from content with what the Indian depart- 
ment was doing, and l)y no means sure that there were not 
sinister agencies at work. " Our Indian affairs do not prosper," 
he wrote, January 9, 178G ; " I fear Britain hids Idgher than 
we do. Our surveys have been checked, and peace with the 
savages seems somewhat precarious." 

Doughty detailed a company of infantry to escort the com- I 
missioners as they proceeded west. Arrived at the mouth of 
the Miami, a field was cleared, stockades and blockhouses were 
built, and the post was named Fort Finney. The Indians had 
been notified that this was the spot for a conference. On J 
November 13, 1785, General Samuel H. Parsons joined his 1 
fellow members, and the commission was ready for its task. 

The Shawnees on the Scioto, who had kept aloof from the 
meeting in Januai-y, 1785, now came in, and a treaty was con- 
cluded on much the same terms as at Fort Mcintosh. They 
agreed to confine themselves in the territory between the Great 
Miami and the Wabash. This was on January 31, 1786, and 
the Indians left five hostages to insure the release of white 
prisoners, which were held among the tribes. Another effect 
of the treaty was that it afforded for a while jirotection to the 
government surveyors on the western lands. 

These several treaties had at last secured from the Indians 



COUNCIL AT NIAGARA. "273 

participating a recognition of the title of this great northwestern 
country which the United States had received from Great Brit- 
ain. This recognition, however, had not been obtained without 
exciting the jealousy of some portion of the conceding tribes, 
particularly of such as had sought an asylum under British 
authority in Canada, and were in December sitting in council 
at Detroit. Brant, desjjite Haldimand's endeavors to prevent 
him, had proceeded to England, and we find him there on 
January 4, 1786, presenting his claims, and, in behalf of the 
whole Indian race, appealing to Sydney for countenance and 
aid in the savages' efforts to keep the Americans south of the 
Ohio. John Adams says that he saw the chieftain at the 
queen's drawing-room. " The ministerial runners," adds this 
observer, "give out that Brant is come to demand compensation 
for the Indian hunting-grounds ceded by the English, and to 
get something for himself as half-pay as colonel." Brant was 
deeply chagrined to find that there had really been a cession of 
the Indian territory to the Americans, and made the best he 
could of Sydney's promise to pay £15,000 for the certified 
losses of the Indians. Brant's disappointment was apparent to 
the ministry, but they counted on his pacifying his tribe, and 
advised his abstaining from revengeful hostilities against the 
Americans. 

While the government in London was struggling with the 
importunities of this chieftain, the American commissioners had 
been only partially successful, as we have seen, at the mouth 
of the Miami, inasmuch as the Cherokees and Mingoes were 
raiding along the Ohio, rather than to join the conference at 
Fort Finney, while the tribes near Sandusky were holding aloof. 
Major Doughty, in March, 1786, sent one Philip Liebert to the 
lake shore to gain, if he could, these suspected bodies. It is 
doubtful if the savages who had seemed complacent at Foi-t 
Finney were acting in the best faith, for by April they knew 
in Detroit that their signing of the treaty was only to gain 
time and prevent the harrying of their villages by the whites. 

By midsummer (1786), Sir John Johnson and Brant, who 
had now returned from England, had called upon the Niagara 
a council of the Six Nations and the western tribes. From 
Brant's bearing, Campbell of the twenty-ninth regiment, which 



274 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

was at Niagara, reported that the Mohawk chieftain was in ill 
humor, and cared only for his own interests. Girty, McKee, 
and their Indians soon joined the council, and on July 25, 1786, 
the Indians had gathered there in good numbers. Brant now 
did his best to unite them in a campaign against the Americans. 
His speeches had not their usual effect, and he next tried per- 
sonal solicitation among their villages, but he was no more suc- 
cessful here ; and in September he was telling the British lead- 
ers in Detroit that he could do nothing more. Indeed, there 
was already a movement among the Indians to start westward, 
and find homes beyond the Mississippi, but it did not go far. 

As the summer of 1786 wore on, it was by no means sure 
that the danger was over. There was a disposition in Virginia 
to bring matters to an issue. Rufus King records how the gov- 
ernor and Assembly of that State were " clamoring for a war 
against the Indians," but Congress without a quorum stood 
still. King further comments on " the lawless and probably 
unjust conduct of the inhabitants of Kentucky towards the In- 
dians bordering on the western side of the Ohio." The secre- 
tary of war was powerless. When, in June, 1786, he needed a 
thousand dollars to transport powder to the western troops, the 
treasury board were not able to supply the funds, and the troops 
deserted because they were not paid. 

The Indian bureau of the confederation had set up two de- 
partments, one north, the other south of the Ohio. The instruc- 
tions of their respective agents on the spot were to regulate 
the relations of the settlers to the Indians, and to protect the 
savages in their territorial rights. To aid in this. Congress, 
which in March had declined to aid Knox in reoraanizinff the 
militia, voted (October 19, 1786) to raise a body of thirteen 
hundred and forty troops, so as to increase the western force to 
a legionary corps of two thousand men, biit the condition that 
they should be raised in New England soon aroused suspi- 
cion that, under the color of pi^otecting the western settlers, it 
was the real purpose of Congress to overawe the participants 
in Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts. On November 29, Gerry 
wrote to King of the Massachusetts legislature that " the coun- 
try members laugh and say the Indian war is only a political 
one to obtain a standing army." On the Canadian side there 
was something of the same indirection. The British government 



CLARK AT VINCENNES. 275 

were not ready to espouse the cause which Brant had not been 
able to set afoot in the west, but they were not averse, as 
Dorchester's instructions to Sir John Johnson show (November, 
178G), to furnishing supplies to the Indians, and in October 
there were two hundred savage warriors waiting at Niagara for 
powder. 

So things wei-e uncertain at every point just beyond the 
mountains ; but farther west, on the Wabash, there were other 
complications arising from the discontent of the old French set- 
tlers at Vincennes. There were in this place, and near the Illi- 
nois, perhaps a thousand French, and they numbered four to one 
American, In the confusion following the war, with their alle- 
giance deprived of an object, they had petitioned the American 
Congress to set up a government among them, to be in some 
soi't stable, and there was at the same time some talk of bring- 
ing additional French thither to increase that population in the 
Ohio valley. This being denied, the situation had become 
grave. Vincennes was a town of some three hundred houses, 
but the sixty American families who made a portion of the 
population lived apart from their French neighbors. The out- 
lying American squatters had withdrawn from the dangers at- 
tending their exposure to the savage marauders, and had sought 
shelter among their (compatriots in the town. The Indians, on 
their part, were harbored among the resident French. So the 
partisans on both sides lived in much insecurity, facing and fear- 
ing each other. 

It was an opportunity for the Kentuckians, who, seeking the 
leadership of George Rogers Clark, now but the wreck of his 
former self, organized at Harrodsburg on August 2, 1786, and 
advanced to relieve the Americans by scattering the Indians. 
In this they sought to do what the general government seemed 
indisposed to attempt. Gathering towards the middle of Sep- 
tember, at the falls of the Ohio, on the 17th, some twelve hun- 
dred in number, horse and foot, they started out. Harmar, 
when he heard of it, had no confidence in their success, so bad 
was their organization, and such difficulty had Clark experi- 
enced in holding the men to his standard. The apprehension 
was well founded, for he accomplished little, and fell back 
upon Vincennes. Here, in an attempt to support a garrison, 
he seized stores from the Spanish merchants, and it was for a 



276 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

while supposed tliat he intended to attack the Spanish across 
the Mississippi. 

The weeks through the antumn of 1786 were disturbed ones. 
Kentuckiaus still pursued the Shawnees and ravaged their 
towns. The Indians were everywhere uneasy, and all through 
Georgia and Virginia the inhabitants were in arms. It was 
the old story of encroachments and counter raids. A hundred 
thousand dollars in specie, said Rufus King, had been paid in 
ten years to satisfy the savages, in the hope of pacifying them, 
but the sacrifice was futile. 

Late in October, Lord Dorchester reached Quebec to assume 
the supreme command. He had come with special instructions 
to pi-event, if possible, the Indians bringing on a war with the 
Americans. On November 27, we find him informing Sir John 
Johnson that this was the king's desire, and in December he 
writes to the commandant at Detroit to " confine the war in as 
narrow bounds as possible," if it should inevitably come. Brant 
was at this time at the straits, and had summoned there a gen- 
eral assembly of the tribes from the Hudson to the Mississippi. 
It was his purpose to formulate the last Indian appeal to be sent 
to the American Congress. A paper was drawn up with such 
skill as Brant possessed, embodying a protest against the con- 
gressional policy of treating with separate tribes, instead of cov- 
enanting with the entire body of the Indians. It insisted upon 
the invalidity of the Indian cessions of land as individual tribes 
had made them. It stood stubbornly for the Ohio as the In- 
dian boundary, and deprecated the sending of surveyors across 
that river. There w^as too much reason to believe, as most 
Americans then thought, not only that British sympathy suj>- 
ported the hostility of the Indians, but also their demand for an 
Ohio frontier. 

Brant certainly felt that in making this stand, it was neces- 
sary to have the countenance of the English ; but it was a 
question how far they would sustain him in actual war. It 
turned out that Sydney, in April, 1787, instructed Dorchester 
to avoid assisting the Indians openly, but to see that they had 
what ammunition they needed. This disguised aid was appar- 
ently become the British policy, while the troops with which 
they manned their posts were insufficient for an active de- 
fense. The forts themselves were in a " ruinous" condition, and 



MONARCHICAL VIEWS. 211 

Dorchester had only two thousand men to hold them along- a 
line eleven hundred miles in length. The governor dej^ended, 
however, upon the assistance of the loyalists and Canadians, if 
the forts were attacked. Sydney had instructed him to retake 
the posts, if they were lost. Nevertheless, it was the manifest 
policy of the British cabinet not to come to extremities, if it 
could be avoided. 

The English ministry were quite prepared for the information 
which Dorchester now began to transmit, and the public press 
was only too ready to augment the stories of a gradual disin- 
tegration in the new Republic. The governing class was eager 
to believe such tales. Lord Lansdowne so felt, and Jay tried 
to disabuse his mind. " We are happy," said the American, 
" in the enjoyment of much more interior tranquillity than the 
English newspapers allow, or their writers seem to wish ns." 
Unfortunately, the question of debts and loyalists had shown 
them the insnliordination of the States, and they were in doubt 
if it was possible for any representative of the confederation 
which could be sent to their court to be sure of his position. 
Sheffield predicted that, sooner or later, the western country 
would revolt and seek the rest of the world through the Missis- 
sippi. All these things incited in England the hope that intes- 
tine disorders and a half-hearted interest in the pro})osed new 
constitution would urge public feeling to seek social and political 
stability in a return to monarchy, and it was fancied that Ham- 
ilton was latently the leader of a growing monarchical party, 
against which the newly organized government was only a tem- 
porary barrier. Hamilton had indeed privately vouched for his 
confidence in the British Constitution : but his pul)lic action was 
opposed. Speaking of the Federal Constitution, he said, " Not 
more than three or four manifested theoretical opinions favora- 
ble in the abstract to a constitution like that of Great Britain : 
but eveiy one agreed that such a constitution would be out of 
the question." So there lingered, not without cause, a feeling 
among the English that public sentiment would some time find 
a reason propitious for an offer of one of the king's sons as a 
sovereign of an allied kingdom, and there were broad intimations 
made that a prince of the house of Hanover would serve tliem 
better than a French Bourbon. The chance was not untalked 
of in the States. " I am told," said Washington to Jay, August 



278 THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST. 

1, 1786, '•' that even respectable characters speak of a monar- 
chical government without horror," " I cannot believe," said 
Benjamin Lincoln, " that these States ever will or ever can be 
governed by laws which have a general operation. Were one 
under an absolute monarch, he might find a remedy, but some 
other mode of relief must be provided." Lincoln was further of 
the opinion that the extent of the country along the seaboard, 
embracing such a variety of climate and production, rendered 
a uniform government less easy of exercise than if its area 
stretched westward in an isothermal belt. " Shall we have a 
king ? " asked Jay. " Not, in my opinion, while other expedients 
remain untried." " No race of kings," said Jefferson in com- 
menting, '•'• has ever presented above one man of common sense 
in twenty generations." But John Adams, in his essay on 
constitutions, had distinctly shown himself, it was thought, 
friendly to the British Constitution, — a point that at a later 
day Fauehet made the most of in his dispatches to the French 
government. 

There were certainly great provocations to these dangerous 
sentiments. Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts had unsettled 
the national hopes, because, as Hamilton said, that State had 
thrown her citizens into rebellion by heavier taxes, " for tiie 
common good," than were paid in any other American com- 
munity. To make matters worse, Jefferson in his wild unbal- 
ance had welcomed the revolt, or proposed to cherish it, as a 
benignant sign, and based his consolation on what Hamilton 
called a " miserable sophism." 

The reckless financial course of Rhode Island had made dark 
the future of all. " The turbulent scenes in Massachusetts and 
the infamous ones in Rhode Island " were the words in men's 
mouths. " The bulk of the people," said one observer, " will 
in-obably prefer the lesser evil of a partition of the Union into 
three more practicable and energetic governments," and the 
advocates of such a partition were a force to be combated by 
the writers of The Federalist, one of whose salient points was 
that a dismemberment of the Union would reopen the question 
of the right to the western lands, lodged in the seaboard States, 
and expose the territorial disputes among the States to the 
arbitrament of war. 

AVhatever the result, whether the call for a king, or disinte- 



BRITISH DELAYS. 279 

o-ration, it had become clear to the British leaders that time 
Avould work to their advantage. So any dilatory policy which 
would put off a hostile demonstration on the part of the In- 
dians, into which the posts might be drawn, was a manifest 
prudence. Meanwhile, it was true that a good deal of the recur- 
rent bitterness in reference to the retention of the posts, which 
the Americans had shown, had gone. Whatever truth there 
may have been in it, Dorchester was beginning to think that, if 
they could not recover these military stations, the Americans 
were content to accept the situation, and seek to rival them in 
trading-posts by establishing new ones on the lakes. When he 
learned that a considerable number of Americans were en- 
camped on the Great Miami, and making their way towards 
Vincennes, the alternative presented itself to his mind that if 
they Avere not aiming to attack the posts, they were intending 
to afford support in founding these rival stations. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

1786-1790. 

During 1785, General Benjamin Tiipper of Massachusetts, 
who was one of Hutchins's surveyors, had opportunities of 
traversing the Ohio country. On his return east, he wrote to 
Washington that he had been charmed with the aspect of the 
west. Later, he spent a night in Rutland, Massachusetts, in a 
house still standing, where with its master. General Rufus 
Putnam, a project was considered of leading a colony of old 
soldiers to this attractive region. The midnight talk of these 
old companions in arms revived the longings shown at New- 
burgh two years before. It was accordingly agreed between 
them to issue a call to the disbanded officers and men of the 
army living in New England, to meet in Boston on March 1, 
1786, to consider a new project of westward emigration. 

The call met with a good response. Eleven delegates ap- 
peared from different New England communities, and within 
two days the Ohio Company was organized. Not only officers 
of the army were welcome, but those who had served on the sea 
as well, and among the naval veterans was Commodore Whipple 
of Rhode Island. There was a good deal of preliminary work 
to be done, for it was necessary to seek those who held land 
certificates for service in the war, as these credits were to be 
accepted in payment for the soil. There being already a tide of 
settlers turning towards Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, 
it was also necessary to set forth by advertisement the greater 
attractions of this western country. In due time, such business 
methods were well arranged under Generals Putnam and Par- 
sons as directors, to whom a third, Manasseh Cutler, skillful 
with the pen and fertile in counsel, was added. 

Rufus Putnam had made a creditable record in the war, 
though, as is often the case with engineer officers, he had not 



CUTLER AND DANE. 281 

gained a consjjicuous position in the public eye. He was of a 
Massachusetts stock that had always been well known. Samuel 
Holden Parsons was a Connecticut man, of good standing, 
though of late years some disclosures, principally in the secret 
service books of Sir Henry Clinton, have raised an unfortunate 
suspicion that he failed at times in loyalty to the revolutionary 
cause. Friendly efforts have thrown these charges into the 
category of things not proven, but it still remains a fact that 
his good faith in relation to the Ohio Company was, in some 
respects, questioned by his associates in that undertaking. 

But the chief spirit in this colonizing movement was a minis- 
ter of the gospel in Ipswich, Massachusetts, who gained distinc- 
tion enough in his pulpit to become a Doctor of Divinity, and 
he knew scarce less of law and medicine. Manasseh Cutler 
was a self-reliant man, and had that confidence in his star which 
characterizes a certain type of New Englander. Moreover, he 
believed, as that sort of a man often does, in making his neigh- 
bors and those he knew best his associates in any hazardous 
undertaking. He was as shrewd and as politic as any among 
the people he favored, not above telling half the truth and bar- 
gaining for the rest. He was equal to cajoling when he could 
not persuade, and by that token not a poor politician. With 
whatever skill he had in subduing opposition, he was a master 
in observation, both of man and nature, and naturalists look 
back to his botanical records to-day as among the earliest in 
New England of much scientific value. He knew, above all, 
how to stand u}) against opposition, whether in man or the 
devil. Such qualities gave him the leading place among those 
who were devising plans for a new life, and seeking, under his 
inspiration, a new career in the distant West. 

While these measures were being shaped in Boston, Nathan 
Dane, an Essex County man, representing Massachusetts in 
Congress, had o})ened the way for a conniiittee, of which Monroe 
was made the chairman, to report an ordinance for the govern- 
ment of the northwest, and in considering the matter, Monroe 
had invited Jay to confer witli the connnittee. It was the 
purpose of the new movement to su])plant Jefferson's ordi- 
nance of 1784. Its progress was delayed, quorums failed, and 
a new Congress intervened before, on April 26, 1787, the 
revised ordinance was reported. There were some features in 



282 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

it not in the earlier law, but there was nothing in the nature of 
a compact to prevent repeal without common consent. The 
question of preventing slavery had been so squarely met and 
thrown out in Jefferson's experience that the subject was now 
ignored. 

A fortnight later, on May 9, the bill came itp for a second 
reading. At this time, General Parsons, now in attendance, 
put in a memorial for a grant of land within the jurisdiction of 
the proposed ordinance. There was, however, something in the 
manner of his application that disturbed both Cutler and 
Putnam when they heard of it, and even excited suspicions of 
Parsons's honesty. A third reading was in order on the next 
day, but there was no quorum, and all business was laid over. 

A month and more now passed, during which interest was 
centred in the federal convention, which assembled at Phihi- 
delphia on May 14. In this interval the work of Congress was 
blocked by the absence of delegates. During these idle days 
Cutler had appeared in New York, prepared to supersede 
Parsons in directing the ap})lication for land in behalf of the 
Ohio Compan}^, now representing two hundred and fifty shares 
at a thousand dollars each. Cutler reached that city on July 5, 
and found Congress with a quorum, the first it had had since 
May 11 ; but its president, Arthur St. Clair, was absent. Hutch- 
ins had advised that the company ask for its territory near the 
Muskingum. Cutler now, in presenting the subject anew, 
showed that he was determined, if land was purchased, that a due 
recognition should be made in the pending ordinance of those 
social and political principles which had been formulated of 
late in the constitution of Massachusetts, and in the laws of the 
States which the new era had fashioned. Cutler's proposition 
came before the committee on July 6, and included a payment 
for the land which he asked for of sixt3^-six and two thirds 
cents the acre, in soldiers' certificates, which, reduced to specie 
value, was equivalent to eight or ten cents. 

Congress at this time hardly knew where to turn to meet its 
financial obligations, and such a proposition was a welcome 
relief in its distresses. Three days later, on eTuly 9, the ordi- 
nance was recommitted to see if it could not be modified to suit 
tlie demands for which Cutler stood. These conditions and 
expectations brought a new atmosphere about the deliberations 



CUTLER AND THE ORDINANCE. 283 

of Congress. The new proposals, it was found, opened the way 
to pay off abont one tenth of the national debt, and in addition, 
the prospect seemed good of combining into a code of funda- 
mental principles the numerous social and political ideas which 
were flying about in the air, and many of which had, in one 
way or another, from time to time, been brought directly to 
the observation of Congress. Some of them involved, however, 
a smothering of cherished antipathies on the part of some of 
the members, particularly a demand for the extirpation of 
slavery north of the Ohio. Cutler was in his element in stand- 
ing as the champion of freedom, and he was politician enough 
to know how the Virginia opposition could be quieted by show- 
ing to the representatives of the Southern States the better 
chance they had of compacting their interests south of the Ohio 
if they conceded something on the other side of that river to 
the principles of the North, since such concessions might 
strengthen the obligations of the North to protect the products 
of slave labor in the South, and to stand by that section of the 
countiy in an inevitable contest with Spain over the free navi- 
gation of the Mississippi. This was to be the chief victory of 
Cutler in paving the way for the later motion of Dane. The 
other points upon which Cutler insisted were more easily carried. 
Such were reservations of land for the support of religion and 
education. The latter object received a double recognition. 
Five sections in each township were set aside for the benefit of 
schools, and two whole townships were devoted to the advance- 
ment of liberal learning. 

While in the hands of the new committee, it would seem 
that the draft of the ordinance was submitted to Cutler for his 
scrutiny, and under his influence, doubtless, some other of the 
final social provisions of the instrument found their place in it. 
Witli these amendments, it was reported back to Congress on 
July 11, and went promptly through successive readings. It 
became a law on the 13tli " with great unanimity," the eight 
States jiresent all voting for it. Rnfus King was not ]iresent in 
the final stages of the question, and Dane, after the passage of 
the ordinance, wrote to him : " We wanted to abolish the old 
system and get a better one, and we finally found it necessary 
to ado])t the l)est we could get." All that was desired was not 
obtained ; but it was nevertheless a triumph for Cutler and those 



284 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

who sympathized with him. The Virginians had yielded much. 
There were, in fact, potent reasons other than those ah-eady 
mentioned for them to accede, since it gave them the hope of 
using the proposed trans-montane community to further their 
scheme of opening communication with the west through the 
Virginia rivers. So the tricks of give and take, as politicians 
understand them, did their part in the work. 

It is of little consequence, if not futile, to try to place upon 
any one the entire credit, such as it was, of this famous ordi- 
nance of 1787. Cutler's interposition was doubtless opportune. 
What the Massachusetts country parson was from the outside, 
very likely the Massachusetts lawyer, Nathan Dane, was from 
the inside ; and with both combining, with Congress ready to 
bargain and be complacent, and with the example of Jefferson's 
earlier ordinance, and the personal influence of King and others 
according, the instrument took its final shape, as the natural 
and easy outgrowth of surrounding conditions. It was also, 
as Rufus King called it, "■ a compromise of ojjinions," and he 
added, in writing to Gerry, " When I tell you the history of 
this ordinance, you shall acknowledge that I have some merit 
in the business." 

Congress, as we have seen, had caused a large tract of ter- 
ritory to be surveyed west of the mountains, thinking, by dis- 
posing of it, to place the finances of the young Republic on a 
healthy basis ; but there had been few or no sales of the land. 
Cutler, as a buyer, had now aj^peared, ready and anxious to 
make a purchase and give a vital flow to the revenue. 

The federal convention, just at this time sitting in Phila- 
delphia, was seeking to find a way ou.t of a dismal political 
environment. It needed, in one asj^ect, the encouragement of 
just the outcome which a copy of the perfected ordinance, as 
])rinted in a Philadelphia newspaper on July 25, afforded it. 
The bold assumption of Congress to regulate the public domain 
was a stroke which helped the convention better to understand 
the relations of the States to the unorganized territory in the 
west. The enlarged conception which the new ordinance gave 
of the future problem of western power, and its effect on the 
original States, clarified the perplexities which had excited in 
the convention the apprehensions of Gerry and others. The 
influence which the new outlook had upon the different mem- 



CHARACTER OF THE ORDINANCE. 285 

bers was naturally in accordance with their individual habits 
of mind. Morris expressed a fear at granting any new western 
state privileges like those enjoyed by the seaboard common- 
wealths. The chief advocate of equal rights was George Mason 
of Virginia. " If it were possible," he said, " by just means 
to prevent emigration to the western country, it might be good 
policy. But go the people will, as they find it for their in- 
terest ; and the best policy is to treat them with that equality 
which will make them friends, not enemies." He had, too, a 
just anticipation of the time " when they might become more 
numerous and more wealthy than their Atlantic brethren." 
Kiug, whom Brissot was reporting as " the most eloquent man 
in the United States," evinced wherein his hope lay : " The 
eastern State of the three proposed will probably be the first, 
and more important than the rest ; and will, no doubt, be 
settled chiefly by eastern people, and there is, I think, full an 
equal chance of its adopting eastern politics." So with some a 
hope to bolster the power of the North as against the South was 
not the least consideration in the movement. 

The ordinance shows, in its conglomerate character and some- 
what awkward combinations, the rapid changes which took 
place in it during the brief interval while it was upon the 
anvil of Cutler and the reformers. The company which was to 
act under it was waiting, and there was no time to spend 
to weld into symmetry its independent parts. The instrument 
was peculiarly the outcome of prevalent ideas. Congress by 
previous legislation had experimented with many of them. 
The statutes of several of the States, the constitution of Massa- 
chusetts, and the Bills of Rights largely patterned upon that of 
Virginia, and which the new fervor of independence and liber- 
ated humanity had elicited, were but other expressions of cur- 
rent hopes drawn upon, while devoted hands were moulding the 
provisions of the ordinance Thus it was an embodiment of 
current aspirations, and had not a single new turning-point in 
human progress ; but it was full of points that had already been 
turned. Let us pass in review its leading features so as to 
show this. 

The ordinance was intended to provide security and politi- 
cal content in a territory of two hundred and seventy thousand 



286 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

five hundred and fifty square miles, or thereabouts, which was 
larger than any known in Europe, except Russia, and twice as 
large as Great Britain and Ireland combined. This country 
lay above the Ohio, east of the Mississippi, and was bounded 
on the north by Lakes Erie, Huron, and Superior. It was to 
be divided eventually into five States, and the Eastern States 
had welcomed this provision as a substitute for the smaller 
commonwealths which Jefferson had proposed. 

As this provision was made a part of a compact, it was sup- 
posed that this territorial distribution was binding. Everybody 
counted blindly. They did not sufficiently comprehend that 
any planning for the future of an extensive and little-known 
territory must necessarily, compact or no compact, depend for 
its perpetuity on a sustaining public interest. The question of 
bounds of these five States, as provided in the fifth compact 
of the ordinance, was peculiarly liable to such vicissitudes. In 
defining the latitudinal line which was to make the northern 
boundary of the three lower States, the framers of the ordi- 
nance had overlooked the more accurate configurations of 
Ilutchins's map of 1778, and had gone back to Mitchell's map 
of 1755. In this way they accepted a false position for the 
southern bend of Lake Michigan, which that divisionary line 
was to touch. The question of sharing in some equitable way 
the frontage on the lakes, and the plea that an infringement of 
the compact of the ordinance was necessary to afford such a 
frontage so as to prevent Illinois casting in her lot with the 
South, in due time, threw to the winds, as a matter of course, 
that obligation of the instrument, and a majority vote dissolved 
the compact, as it did in another question of inherent national 
interest when the acquisition of Louisiana was confirmed. A 
similar disregard of the agreement, also, in time abridged the 
rightful claim of Wisconsin to the region east of the upper 
Mississippi and south of the Lake of the Woods. In this re- 
spect any modern map shows how futile the compact was. 

The provision of the fourth section of the compact seeking to 
promote trade in transit, by declaring streams and connecting 
portages common highways, had already been anticipated, in 
connection with Virginia's project for opening channels to west- 
ern trade, by a resolution of Congress on May 12, 1786. Pick- 
ering had ursfed it before in a letter to Rufus Kins: : " It seems 



SLAVERY CLAUSE. 287 

very necessary to secure the freedom of navigating water com- 
munications to all the inhabitants of all the States. I hope we 
shall have no Scheldts in that country." 

The assurance for a representative government, which the 
ordinance gave, was accompanied by a provision which allowed, 
as was permitted in the ordinance of 1784, the adojjtion of 
the laws of any of the older States. The provision sometimes 
proved an onerous one amid environments which rendered mod- 
ifications of such laws necessary to a healthful condition of 
public life. It was provided that when a State reached a 
population of sixty thousand free persons, it could form a con- 
stitution and be admitted to Congress by delegates allowed to 
vote, while with a less population such delegates could not vote. 
A property qualification was rendered necessary in order to 
be either voter or magistrate, and, if manhood suffrage is an 
advance, the ordinance made a backward step, for Jefferson's 
ordinance had given every man the right to vote. The new 
act nearly mated the provision of the Virginia constitution of 
1776, where a vague requirement of "sufficient evidence of per- 
manent common interest with, and attachment to, the commu- 
nity" had been considered to mean the possession of a freehold. 

The section for the exclusion of slavery, which was intro- 
duced by Dane on the second reading of the bill, was a matter 
that had been for a long time bandied about between North and 
South, and between factions for and against, l)oth in the North 
and in the South. The phrase, " all men are born free and 
equal," in some of its forms, used in the Virginia Constitution 
in 1776, repeated in the Declaration of Independence, and cop- 
ied in the Bills of Rights of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, 
was sinqily a hackneyed expression of political assertion, as 
John Adams said at the time. It meant what it pleased any- 
body to say it meant. There was no thought in Virginia that 
it touched the question of slavery, wliile in Massachusetts, 
under the pressure of public opinion, it was seized ujjon by 
the Supreme Court of the State, in 1783, to signify the legal 
abolishment of slavery in that community. With the same 
language to deal with in the New Hampshire constitution 
(1783), it was early construed as freeing those only who were 
born after the enactment. Similar phraseology in the Vermont 
constitution, in 1777, had not been held to abolish slavery. 



288 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

With such " rights and liberties " as Virginians acquired 
under her constitution, with her interpretation of that phrase, 
she covenanted with the Union in her deed of cession of March 
1, 1784, that they should still pertain to her citizens then in 
the northwest territory. Notwithstanding this, her representa- 
tives had voted for Cutler's bill, which he thought in conflict 
with that covenant. While, then, this professed prohibition of 
slavery in the northwest was in July, 1787, enacted in New 
York, George Mason was saying in August, in the federal con- 
vention in Philadelphia, that " the western people are already 
calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that 
country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina 
and Georgia." Mason's reference was of course mainly to the 
people south of the Ohio ; but it is by no means certain that 
Cutler knew just what this prohibition of the ordinance meant 
for the north side of the Ohio. There were four or five thou- 
sand French and half-breeds in the Illinois country, whose 
rights of property had been guaranteed in the treaties of 1763 
and 1782, and human servitude prevailed among them. Did 
this ordinance provide for its extinction and without compen- 
sation to the owners of slaves ? Some evidently feared it, for 
there was some emigration of such over the Mississippi from 
Kaskaskia. Fortunately, in the awkward dilemma, the faith 
and justice of Congress, careless of promoting them, were estab- 
lished for that body by St. Clair when he became governor of 
the territory. He reported to the President that he had con- 
strued the ordinance with something of the same freedom that 
had been used with the glittering words of the Bills of Rights, 
as intending only to prevent the introduction of slaves, and 
not aimed at emancipating such as were there and had been 
introduced " under the laws by which they had formerly been 
governed." He hoped, he said, that in doing this he had not 
misunderstood " the intentions of Congress," as by his inter- 
pretation he had quieted the apprehension of the people and 
prevented their flying beyond the Mississippi. 

Therefore the ordinance failed to abolish slavery, and it was 
not, moreover, any novelty in its professions of abolishment. 
When there had been, under Pickering's influence, a movement 
in the army, in 1783, to provide homes for the war-stained vet- 
erans, it had been a condition too emphatic for misinterpreta- 



RELIGION AND EDUCATION. 289 

tion that the total exclusion of slavery should be " an essential 
and irrevocable part of the constitution of the proposed State." 
Mason and other Virginians had been, as we have seen, advo- 
cates for the abolition of slavery. Jefferson's preliminary 
ordinance of 1784 had rooted it out of every part of the trans- 
Alleghany region, though this section had received only the 
votes of six States, when seven were required. Cutler had 
indeed, with Dane's aid, turned the southern adherence to negro 
bondage so adroitly to his own piu'pose that he had secured, 
futile though it was, the expression in the last article of the 
compact which was intended to extirpate slavery. For this in- 
tention due credit must be given ; but King and Pickering had 
been public advocates of abolition before ever Cutler was heard 
of. The American Anti-Slavery Society had been founded in 
Philadelphia in 1775. Tom Paine had written the preamble 
of the Abolition Act of Pennsylvania in 1780. A society for 
the liberating of slaves had been organized in New York in 
1785. Notwithstanding these signs, it is apparent that the 
provision of the new ordinance for this end was never pro- 
claimed, for fear of the influence it might have to prevent emi- 
gration to the territory. There is indeed no evidence that the 
supposed fact of prohibition was ever used in any advertisement 
of the Ohio Company to advance settlement. The ordinance 
can hardly be said to have been instrumental in keeping human 
bondage out of the northwest in later years. It afforded a 
rallying cry ever after 1795, when the movement of the slaveiy 
faction began in that region to overcome and eradicate the aver- 
sion of the people to such bondage, but it was the constancy of 
a later generation, and the leading of such as Governor Coles, 
and not an ordinance which was never in its entire provisions 
effective, which had been annulled by the ado])tion of the con- 
stitution, and substantially reenacted by the first Congress, that 
did the work which was really consummated in the constitu- 
tion of Illinois at a much later day. 

Congress had for some time played fast and loose with the 
question of religion and education. George Mason had long 
been the redoubtable cham]>ion of both. In the revision of the 
Virginia laws in 1777, Jefferson had contended for " religious 
freedom with the broadest bottom." Though the provision for 



290 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

the support of religion had been once lost in Congress, the sus- 
tenance of education had been a part of Bland's motion in June, 
1783, and again in the bill for surveys in 1785, when lot six- 
teen was set aside in each township. The allowing of all kinds 
of orderly worship and the furtherance of religious interests, 
the sujjport of education and the protection of Indian rights, 
were now secured — as they had been often allowed before in 
other parts of the country — in the first and third articles of 
the compact. 

The provisions of the second compact for the regulating of 
social life were all ordinary observations pertaining to common 
law processes, the writ of habeas corpus., and trial by jury. 
The conditions developed in Massachusetts by Shays's rebellion 
had induced Richard Henry Lee and Nathan Dane to become 
sponsors of the clause which prohibited laws impairing the ob- 
ligations of private contracts. The absolute ownership of lands, 
the equal sharing of propex'ty, and the prevention of primo- 
geniture and entail were all in the creeds of Jefferson, Monroe, 
Johnson, and others, and had before been embodied in the laws 
of Virginia and other States. Hamilton had pointed to the 
common observance of an equal inheritance as insuring the 
country from the evils of a moneyed aristocracy. 

So the ordinance of 1787 introduces us to nothing new in 
human progress. There was doubtless that in it which proved 
a guiding star for future legislation, as in the struggle over the 
slavery question in Illinois ; but it may well be questioned if 
later enactments, without such a beacon, and keeping in sight 
the interests of the community as they arose, would not have 
made of the northwest all that it has become. The provisions 
of this fundamental law were operative just so far as the public 
interests demanded, and no farther, and the public interests 
would have had their legitimate triumph unaided by it. The 
ordinance simply shared this condition with all laws in commu- 
nities which are self-respecting and free. 

The ordinance disposed of, Congress, on July 23, authorized 
the Board of the Treasury to sell to the Ohio Company a tract 
of land lying between the Seven Ranges and the Scioto, and 
beginning on the east five miles away from the left bank of the 
Muskingum. The tract was supposed to contain pne million 



THE OHIO COMPANY. 



291 







THE OHIO COMPANY'S PURCHASE. 

[From a General Map of the Course of (he Ohio from its Source to Us Junction ivith the 
Mississippi, in Collot's .l//r/.v.] 

five hundred thousand acres, for which there was to be paid, if 
the measurement proved correct, a milHon dollars in soldiers' 
certificates, one lialf down and the other half when the land was 
surveyed. In order to increase the inducement for the govern- 
ment to sell, — for tliere had arisen a doubt if Cutler's terms 



292 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

of payment were to be accepted, — and at the same time to 
play furtively into the hands of Colonel Duer, an ardent sjaecu- 
lator and " rej^resentative of some of the principal characters 
in the city," this New England parson and trusted agent of the 
Ohio Company, on the same day, and keeping Duer's partici- 
pancy in the shade, suddenly increased his proposal for terri- 
tory. He asked now for five million acres, and offered a 
payment of 13,500,000. Cutler by this time had discovered 
that St. Clair, who since the 17th had been in his chair as 
presiding- officer of Congress, was not averse to receiving the 
governorship of the new territory, and though St. Clair was not 
Cutler's choice, the latter found it politic to favor the presi- 
dent's somewhat disguised aspirations so as to advance his 
own enlarged project. Under this reinforcement. Cutler's lag- 
ging project had been resuscitated, and the bargain was con- 
cluded, and the desired area was secured. It was to include 
country north from the Ohio, ten townships of an eighth range, 
and to extend west, south of the upper boundary of the tenth 
township, till seventeen ranges of six miles each had been cov- 
ered. Hutchins thought that the meridian making the western 
bounds of the last range would come nearly opposite the mouth 
of the Kanawha, thus by a considerable stretch falling short of 
the Scioto. This was indeed a misjudgment, which, with other 
mishaps, led to some serious complications, as we shall see. 

The bargain clinched. Cutler and Winthrop Sargent, the 
later secretary of the colony, to whom the grant had been 
made, sold on the same day a half interest to Colonel William 
Duer, as had been understood, who, on his part, agreed to ad- 
vance money to help meet the payment on the whole. The 
other moiety of the purchase remained with Cutler and those 
associated with him in the subterfuge. 

Three months later, aftei' the surveys had been made, the 
bargain was finally consummated on October 27, 1787. It was 
then found that the Ohio Company's part of the purchase was 
but nine hundred and sixty-four thousand two hundred and 
eighty-five acres, for which only $642,856.66 was to be paid. 
The transaction had absorbed something less than one half of 
the two million acres pledged by warrant to the soldiers of the 
recent war. Congress had, August 8, 1786, made the Ameri- 
can silver dollar very like the Spanish, and this specie basis 



FORT HARMAR. 



293 



was to govern the value of the warrants, however variable the 
current paper value of the scrip. 

It was fortunate for the new settlement that it was to have, 
at the mouth of the Muskingum, an assured safety in the neigh- 
borhood of Fort Ilarmar, which had been built there in 1785 
for the protection of the surveyors and as a refuge for the traf- 
fickers on the river. This post and Fort Mcintosh at the 
mouth of the Big Beaver were the only stations now held by 




FORT HARMAR. 

[After a cut in tlie Aniericrm Pioneer, vol. i., Cincinnati, 1844. The small liou.se in the left 
foreground is where St. Clair made the treaty of 1789. Just above this house is the mouth of 
the Muskingum, and over that the point on which Marietta was built.] 

the government north of the Ohio, They commanded the 
routes to two different portages, both leading to the C^iyahoga 
and Lake Erie. Wharton, in 1770, in addressing Lord Hills- 
borough, had spoken of the Cayahoga as having a wide and 
deep mouth large enough to receive great sloops from the lake. 
" It will hereafter be a place of great im])ortance," he added. 
It was considered in Virginia that one of the most effective 

Note. — The map on the two following pages is iro\\\ Cxhvec<\-\\x^& Leltres iVrm Ctilliratenr, 
vol. iii., Paris, 1787, and shows tlie valleys of the Hockhocking, Muskingum, and Big Beaver, and 
purports to be based on observations of Bouquet, and on information from the Shawnee chief, 
White Eyes. 



(^^ate Partly. &ee fntzric^e/zstt 



ESQUISSI 





ESQi^JSSE ■ BES , RIVIERES ^^ 



MUSKINGHUM ET GRAND CASTOR 



i/' c^np^^ (//^rcyyCi. 7'(a/c//t/i. 



a-e-^ 4^'. 



/t//^f'7ri //'///' ■?// ^ni 



■/..; /y .'A 7/ L.J n 






■va, 






O Af^r /^/T^ ( c/i.<;//e^^- ^3 L/ru/s^/tiZt Vi^ 



296 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

measures to be fostered was the opening- of canals where now 
these portages necessitated a land carriage. The country, in-e- 
spective of its value for transit, was of itself an attractive one, 
and at this time, as General Harmar tells us, buffalo swarmed 
along its alluvial bottoms, not to disappear till ten or twelve 
years later, leaving memories with the settlers of many a savory 
haunch. Putnam, when he came to know the country, called 
its climate as " healthy as any on the globe ; " and of the land 
itseK he said that it was the " best tract, all circumstances 
considered, which the United States had or ever will have to 
dispose of, to such an extent." In respect to its numerous 
intervales, he held it to be a more advantageous settlement than 
either the Scioto or Miami regions, which, as we shall see, were 
at the same time seeking other occupants. 

The new movement was as encouraging to the government 
as it was promising to those embarked in it. Before the sale 
was consummated, Eichard Henry Lee had written (October 11, 
1787) to Washington that the lands at the west were becoming 
" productive very fast," and he was hopeful enough to believe 
that " the lands yet to be disposed of, if well managed, would 
sink the whole thirty millions [of debt] that are due." 

During the summer of 1787, Harmar with a military force 
had advanced to Vincennes to take its French population under 
protection, while Major Hamtramck was left in command at 
Fort Harmar to watch the coming immigrations. With the 
following spring, the tide of settlers flowed actively. The 
Conestoga wagons, which of late years had superseded the pack- 
mule in passing the mountains, poured into Red Stone on the 
Monongahela, bringing some discontents, if current reports are 
believed, who were escaping from subjection to the new Federal 
Constitution. Pittsburg, with a population, as Colonel May 
expressed it, " two dogs to a man," was in itself federal in 
sympathy ; but the surrounding country afforded all the sym- 
pathy that was wanted by the flying democrats. This western 
community was now for the first time kept in some corre- 
spondence with the seaboard, through a postal service on horses 
which had just been established, connecting Philadelphia at a 

Note. — The map on the opposite page is from The JVavif/nfnr (Pittsburg. 8th ed., 1814), and 
shows, liow the navigable channel passes tlie Muskingum. Tlie islands are : 34, Duvall's ; 35, 
Muskingum ; 36, Second ; 37, James's ; 38, Blennerhasset's. It is the earliest published river chart. 



THE NAVIGATOR. 

Marietta 




298 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

fortnight's interval with the Ohio. The flatboats in which the 
new-comers descended the Monongahela to the main river were 
fitted witli wagon tops over their after-parts, affording some 
shelter to the women and children. The men picked off' the 
buffalo and wild turkeys on the banks to keep the company 
supplied with fresh meat. It was not easy to make an accurate 
record of the number of boats which were constantly passing 
into the Ohio at Pittsburg, for many floated by in the night ; 
but in 1788, up to May 11, at least two hundred boats, averag- 
ing twenty persons to each, passed that })oint in the daytime. 
When land in Pennsylvania in large tracts was selling at half 
a guinea an acre, there was naturally a large exodus over the 
mountains. 

Not a boat of this moving flotilla was freighted with so much 
of promise as one long, bullet-proof barge which, in the hazy air, 
passed unguardedly by the mouth of the Muskingum, till its 
company was first made aware of their nearing their destina- 
tion by the walls of Fort Harmar looming through a thick mist. 
With some aid from the garrison, for which they had signaled, 
the overjoyed company pushed their boat back against the 
current, and brought it up against the eastern bank of the 
Muskingum. The name of this fateful ci-aft was the " May- 
flower," a reminiscence of that other vessel, which nearLy a 
hundred and sixty-eight j^ears before, and freiglited with a still 
greater promise, cast her anchor under the shelter of Cape Cod. 
The bleak shores of New England, without a sign of welcome 
on that November day, 1620, were a strong contrast on this 7th 
of April, 1788, to the limpid stream reflecting the verdure of 
spring, and the welcoming flag of the new Republic floating 
above the fort. 

Let us go back a few months. At a meeting of the pro- 
moters of the Ohio enterprise in Boston on the 21st of the 
preceding November, it had been determined to found their 
future city at the mouth of the Muskingum, and two days later 
Rufus Putnam was chosen the leader of the pioneers. Boat- 
builders were sent forward, and by the last of January, 1788, 
they had begun their work on the Youghiogheny. Putnam, 
with the surveyors and engineers, joined them by the middle of 
February. Everything was ready, and by the 2d of April the 



MARIETTA. 299 

" Mayflower " floated out upon the stream, and five days later 
she reached the Muskingum. " No colony in Americra," said 
Washington, " was ever settled under such favorable circum- 
stances/' The position which had been chosen was a striking- 
one. Samuel Wharton, in 1770, had extolled the country. 
Evans and Hutchins had publicly joined in glowing descriptions 
of it. The confluence of the Ohio and the Muskingum formed 
two attractive peninsulas, with high banks, and a breadth of 
two hundred and fifty yards of limpid water flowing between 
them. On the lower point Fort Ilarmar had been built. On 
the upper were the scattered mounds of a long-vanished people. 
Here, amid a growth of trees, some of which, surmounting the 
earthworks, attested their great age, the labors of the new 
colony were to begin. Through the late spring and sunmier 
the initial work of the pioneers, and of those that soon joined 
them, was carried on. Ground was cleared for many an allotted 
home lot, and for their stockade, called the Campus Martius. 
Some built huts of the planks that had made their boats. 
Others felled trees and constructed ruder shelters. The few 
yokes of oxen which they had brought dragged the timber 
among the stumps, where lately the forest stood. They sank 
saw-pits, and turned tree-trunks into planks. Some were at- 
tracted by the comely grain of the black walnut, and saved it 
against need to make household tables and chests. 

They gained acquaintance during these summer months with 
every subtly changeable quality which the climate coi;ld show. 
There was at one time intense heat and myriads of gnats. The 
river w\ater, which was their dependence, was sickening in its 
tepidness. Then there came cloud-bursts, followed by rainbows. 
Away in the mountains, beyond their observation, there were 
deluges, and the rivers that skirted their acres became wonder- 
fully agitated, and they looked on in wonder. They had neviiJ- 
before seen rivers rise so rapidly. Again, the torrid air would 
flee suddenly before an atmosphere which in June seemed like 
September. All such changes induced a ra])id vegetation, 
which surprised M. Saugrain, the naturalist, who w'as on the 
spot during the year. Their gardens leaped from sprout to 

Note. — Tlie map on the two follnwinp; patjes shows Fort Harinar and tliR site of Marietta, to- 
gether with ancient earthworks of tlie " Monnd-builders."' It is from Crfevecoeur's Toi/fir//' dans 
la haute Pensylrnnif, Paris, ISOl. 



^^ 



MoTt hcu/7e,f. 




302 ■ THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

bud, and from blossoms to edibles. Fifteen thousand fruit 
trees were in bearing within a few years. Brissot found the 
soil " from three to seven feet deep, and of astonishing- fertility. 
It is projier," he adds, "• for every kind of culture, and it nu;lti- 
plies cattle almost without the care of man." These and the 
game — buffalo, deer, bear, with turkeys, pheasants, geese, and 
ducks — and the marvelous fish of the streams — carp, stui'- 
geon, and perch — furnished their tables with a rich abundance. 
Those who were invited to the mess of the officers in the fort 
were gladdened with a still greater variety. But their New 
England bringing-up did not let many of them forget their 
Sunday " dinner of beans," as one of their diaries shows. 

The neighboring Indians, who ventured among the settlers 
to shake hands and barter, soon perceived that a policy differing 
from what the savages had known in the whites was governing 
their new neighbors. The New Englanders were making their 
settlement much compacter than had been the habit of the 
squatters upon tomahawk claims on the other side of the Ohio. 
Parsons was soon reporting to his friends at the east how the 
natives were struck by this. That individual irresj)onsibility 
which had been found in the long knives of Kentucky was on 
the very next day after the arrival of the first barge banished 
from the new colony by the promulgation of a code of laws. 
These were temporarily devised, pending the arrival of their 
governor, and made public by being nailed to a tree. They 
selected a man of repute among them, Return Jonathan Meigs, 
to be responsible for their enforcement. 

Within a few seasons, something like twenty thousand souls 
floated down tlie Ohio to such expectant, law-abiding communi- 
ties, and it remained to be seen whether these novel conditions 
of civilized life in the western wilderness would have a benefi- 
cent effect upon the five thousand savage warriors who made 
their homes between the Ohio and the lakes. 

The colony's working parties in the field were from the first 
prudently protected by armed patrols. There wei-e, indeed, 
occasional alarms, compelling the withdrawal of everybody to 
the shelter of the stockade, but there was no serious disturbance 
of their qiiiet beyond an attack upon an outpost which they 
soon established up the Muskingum. A few Mingoes and 
other savage desperadoes wandered on the Scioto, and from a 



I 




MARIETTA. 
[This cut is from Harris's Journal oj' a Tour in 1803.1 



304 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

high rock on the Virginia bank, nearly opposite its mouth, the 
Indian lookouts watched for the descending boats, and some- 
times lured them to destruction ; but above the Muskingum 
there was little danger, and the bed and blanket linings of the 
low cabins on the emigrants' boats rarely received in these 
upper reaches of the Ohio the bullets of the skulking foe. So 
it was that they who passed beyond, bound for Kentucky, ran 
the larger hazard ; but the risks did not produce great hesitancy 
among them. By the end of the summer of 1788, there were 
less than one hundred and fifty adult males in the Muskingum 
colony ; while for the j^revious twelve months, something like 
live hundred boats, carrying ten thousand emigrants, were 
known to have passed Fort Harmar, to take the chances of the 
savage gauntlet and land their passengers for the Kentucky 
settlements, with which there was now talk of uniting those on 
the Cumberland. 

The New England element on the Ohio became eventually 
mixed with a large infusion of that Presbyterian Scotch-Irish 
blood which had been long strengthening the fibre of the Ken- 
tucky spirit. Those of this blood that passed into the Ohio 
region came over the mountains from New York and Pennsyl- 
vania, and have left their descendants in the east and central 
regions of the present State of Ohio. Those that fled from the 
uncongenial surroundings of Carolina and its slave code were 
scattered along the I'iver shelves and back of them, between the 
Muskingum and the Miamis. 

The spring of 1788 was a busy one for Putnam and his com- 
panions. There had been the labor of gathering and trans- 
shipping their supplies at Pittsburg, now a muddy and coal- 
blackened little village of a few score houses and a thousand 
people. When Parsons and Sargent reached there on May 12, 
the former was soon approached by British emissaries, anxious 
to make commercial connections for the new settlement. Their 
choice of negotiator has a sinister look, when we remember 
how Cutler had distrusted Parsons. Nothing came of it. Put- 
nam, a safer man, was much more interested in what Con- 
gress was likely to do with Brant. This Mohawk leader was 
still restless. " The Indians are having a critical time," he 
said. " The Yankees are taking advantage of them, and the 
Eno'lish are eettino- tired of them." If Conijress showed no 



ARTHUR ST. CLAIR. 305 

disjjosition to redress the wrongs of his people, woukl Braut 
yiekl to the Indian passion for war ? A desolating- conflict 
seemed likely from the lawlessness of the remoter squatters, 
and was apparently to be forced on the Wabash by the ini-oads 
of the Kentuckians, who were unhappily most of the time be- 
yond the control of the government. " Not a single Indian war," 
said Jay later in one of his Faderaliat papers, " has yet been 
occasioned by the aggressions of the present federal govern- 
ment, feeblt! as it is ; but there are several instances of Indian 



MARIETTA. 
[From Collot's Allas.'l 

hostilities having been provoked by the im])roper conduct of 
individual States, who, either unable or unwilling to restrain or 
punish offenses, have given occasion to the slaughter of many 
innocent inhabitants." 

BeforeLthe arrival of St. Clair as governor, the colony liad 
compacted itself and given to their town, in commemoration of 
Marie Antoinette, the French queen, the nanie of Marietta, 
by running together parts of her double name. As they liad 
recognized in this the aid of France in their revolutionary 
struggle, they celebrated the fruition of the war in a festival on 
Independence Day, when venison, bear, and buffalo meat regaled 
the appetite, and General Varnum, who with others had left 
Rhode Island to escape the tyranny of her paper-money faction, 
delivered an acceptable address. Five days later, they received 
their new executive with a salute of fourteen guns. 

This man, Arthur St. Clair, was of Scotcli and noble birth, 
and had been educated at Edinburgh. He had come to Anu-r- 
ica thirty years before, and had served under Amherst at Louis- 
burg and under Wolfe at Quebec. He had been sent later on 
staff business to Boston, and had there married, in 1760, the 



306 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

daughter of a family of social standing, and secured with her 
a competence. This he later lost in Pennsylvania, where he 
had settled in 1764. Joining the patriot side in the war for 
independence, he had, though much in service, attracted little 
favorable notice. He perhaps met undue censure for his fail- 
ure to thwart Burgoyne, at Ticonderoga, in an " unexpected and 
unaccountable " evacuation of that post, as Hamilton said. He 
later engaged in the civil service, and was president of Con- 
gress when Cutler, playing upon his vanity, helped on his own 
projects by favoring St. Clair's aspirations to be governor of the 
new territory. It is fair to remember, however, that St. Clair 
professed this was an honor thrust upon him. He was now a 
man of fifty-four, and not in his political opinions without some- 
what advanced views, as appeared in part when he made his 
inaugural address. Eleven days later, in July, he created, by 
proclamation, the county of Washington, which embraced the 
eastern half of tlie present State of Ohio, and the machinery 
of government was set in motion. He and the three judges — 
Samuel H. Parsons, J. M. Varnum, and J. C. Symmes — now 
fashioned a permanent code of laws which, in its provisions, 
was very strict and even cruel. ■ Debt and petty offenses were 
harshly treated, and " in punishment of crime " the statutes insti- 
tuted a barbaric kind of servitude, compared with which the 
bondage of the slaves at Vincennes was mild. On September 
22, the governor marched in the procession of magistrates which 
opened on that day the first session of their organized court. 

St. Clair found, however, his most difficult task not in gov- 
erning his immediate dependents, but in carrying out the wishes 
of Congress to extinguish the Indian title everywhere south of 
41°, and west to the Mississippi. Mated with this was the per- 
haps greater difficulty of controlling the recklessness of the 
irresponsible squatter and the wild bushranger's provocation of 
the Indian. 

Soon after Brant had presented his memorial to Congress, 
insisting upon the Ohio as the Indian boundary, the govern- 
ment of the confederation had addressed itself to accom])lish 
by treaty what it hardly dared attempt by war, while the north- 
ern posts were in the hands of the British. The chief impedi- 
ments in this action had been found in the rampant propensi- 
ties of the Kentuckians. "■ It is a mortifying circumstance," 



1 



CA MP US MA R TI US. 



807 







wrote Havmar on December 9, 1787, to the secretary of war, 
"that while under the sanction of the federal authority negotia- 
tions for treaties are hokling with the Indians, there shouhl be 
such presumption in the people of Kentucky as to be forming- 
expeditions against them." The natural result of such irregu- 
lar warfare was the forming among the tribes of '' confedera- 
tions and combinations," whose mischief-making it was expected 
tliat St. Clair would thwart. 

It was a question then, and has been since, in all surveys of 
this period, how far the British government, or its individual 



308 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

agents, were responsible for the Indian hostilities. St. Clair, 
in January, 1788, wrote to the secretary of war : "■ Notwith- 
standing the advice the Indians received from Lord Dorches- 
ter to remain at peace with the United States, there can be 
^ but little doubt that the jealousies they entertain are fomented 
by the agents of the British crown." Hamilton wrote in The 
Federalist : " The savage tribes on our western frontiers ought 
to be regarded as our natural enemies and their [Great Brit- 
ain] natural allies, because they have most to fear from us and 
most to hope from them," and for this reason he was urging a 
standing national army instead of local protection of the fron- 
tiers. A lack of unity of purpose in the States, and a setting 
of local interests before those of the confederation, was a con- 
stant source of perplexity in many ways. In dealing with the 
Indians, this lack of a common policy was most harassing. In 
»Tuly, 1788, St. Clair complains of the government of New 
York distracting the Six Nations by calling them to council 
at Fort Stanwix and making a treaty, at the same time that the 
federal authorities were inviting them to a conference at Fort 
Harmar. 

Since 1786, when the tribes had been summoned to a council 
by George Rogers Clark, the Indians as a body, on one pre- 
tense or another, had avoided making a treaty with the whites. 
In the summer of 1788, St. Clair had urged such a meeting 
upon them, not, however, without a suspicion that they would 
decide upon war as an alternative. In this belief he was de- 
termined to be forearmed, and by the first of September, 1788, 
he had called upon the governments of Virginia and Pennsyl- 
vania to hold in readiness some three or four thousand militia, 
while he equipped his regulars for forest service, and hoped to 
add to them some three or four hundred recruits from the 
French on the Wabash. 

It was with some apprehension lest they were more deter- 
mined on war than on peace that St. Clair saw the warrior chief- 
tains begin to assemble at Foi't Harmar on the 9th of Sep- 
tember, 1788. Representatives of the. various tribes came in 
slowly. Meanwhile, a dubious character, one John Connolly, 
known to be a British emissary, was disquieting the governor, 
lest to the Indian difficulty another was to be added. The gov- 
ernor heard in November that Connolly had gone to Kentucky 



ST. CLAIIVS TREATIES. 309 

in behalf of Lord Dorchester, and it was not quite clear whether 
Connolly's purpose was to detach the Kentuckians from the 
American cause by offering them better security under British 
protection, or his mission had some connection with the Span- 
iards and the Mississippi. We now know that Dorchester had 
a month before (October, 1788) informed his home government 
that the people of Kentucky were both planning to force the 
Mississippi and to bargain with the English for an outlet 
through the St. Lawrence, and this throws some light on the 
way in which Parsons had been approached at Pittsburg. 
Before this, in August, 1788, Madison had written to Jeffer- 
son : " Spain is taking advantage of disgust in Kentucky, and 
is actually endeavoring to seduce them from the Union, — a 
fact as certain as it is important." 

While St. Clair was in the uncertain frame of mind that 
suspicions of this kind engendered, by December 12, those of 
the Six Nations and other tribes who had been proof against 
the persuasions of Brant and McKee had assembled at Fort 
Ilarmar in such numbers that the governor was ready to open 
the conference. There was by this time, because of St. Clair's 
constant professions, no hope on the Indians' part that Brant's 
contention for the Ohio as a boundary would be recognized. 
Brant and his Mohawks had withdrawn to Detroit. This 
development distressed St. Clair, as it well might, and it gave 
him further anxiety to learn that Dorchester was strengthening 
the fortifications of Detroit. He also received further proofs 
that the Spaniards were seeking to undermine the loyalty of 
the settlers on the Cumberland and Tennessee, and that Colonel 
George Morgan, who had received a grant from the Spanish 
for a settlement on the west bank of the Mississippi, was hold- 
ing out inducements for settlers disposed to expatriate them- 
selves. This settlement of New Madrid, which Brissot called 
" a pitiful project of granting to those who shall establish them- 
selves there the exclusive right of trading to New Orleans," 
proved a movement which Brissot thought in i-eality " the first 
foundation of tlie conquest of Louisiana." 

Amid such anxieties as these, St. Clair went on with his nego- 
tiation till in the course of January, 1789, he concluded two 
treaties. The first was with the Six Nations, except the Mo- 
hawks, whom Brant had withdrawn. It confirmed the provi- 



310 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

sions made at Fort Stanwix in 1784. The other was with the 
Wyandots and other western tribes, and confirmed the grants 
towards Lake Erie made at Forts Mcintosh and Finney in 1785. 
In some respects the new agreements were more advantageous 
to the whites than the earlier ones. At all events, they con- 
firmed all the grants made by the Indians north of the Ohio 
which Brant had labored to prevent. 

St. Clair made proclamation of the result on January 24, 
1789, and, as Parsons said, the treaty ended " to the satisfac- 
tion of all concerned." St. Clair himself was confident that 
the Indian confederations had been broken and '' Brant had 
lost his influence," though, as the governor wrote to Knox, it 
was not possible for him to extend the bounds beyond the lines 
earlier agreed upon. St. Clair soon discovered that the tribes 
who were not "' concerned " in it were far from being satisfied, 
and this meant the distrust of a large part of the twenty to 
forty thousand Indians — for the estimates are not very pre- 
cise — scattered over the northwest. The Shawnees particu- 
larly were insolent and began their restless maraudings, which 
had a tendency for a while to check western immigration, — a 
condition not unacceptable to the British fur traders at Detroit. 

Knox wrote to Washington a few months after the treaty was 
signed that the Indians possessed a right to the soil in these 
western lands, and it was only to be taken from them by their 
consent or a just war, — a principle easy enough to compre- 
hend, and ever since maintained by the American courts ; but 
the fact that there are always likely to be tribes or bands not 
uniting in agreements opened then, and has raised since, a 
question of title which has usually to be settled by force. 

Meanwhile the fair fame of the Ohio Company was suffering 
from the remote results of the conduct of its chief promoters. 
When it was known what was meant by the sudden increase of 
the purchase which Cutler made, by which he obtained more 
than three times as much land as the company itself had in- 
tended to acquire, there was by no means among his associates 
a general approval of his purposes. 

Cutler's furtive manoeuvre in the purchase, in order to screen 
so manj^ " pi-incipal characters of the country," gave place to 
questionable devices in subsequent efforts to make the most of 



JOEL BARLOW. 311 

what had been acquired as the reward of collusion. It is not 
clear just how far Cutler was responsible for the extravagant 
representations which were used in Paris to promote a bewilder- 
ing speculation and to dupe innocent enthusiasts. Brissot, in 
defending the promoters, claimed that these seductive descrip- 
tions were original, not with Cutler and his allied contrivers, 
but with Ilutchins ; still it is certain the company adopted them. 
The compact of the two companies, as represented by Duer and 
Cutler, professed that they were " jointly and equally concerned 
in Europe and America in the disposal of their lands," which 
connects Cutler on its face with any nefarious practices of Duer 
and his agents. Putnam, at least, as one of the trustees of the 
company, could hardly have been ignorant of much that was 
done, and was indeed actively engaged in some part of it. The 
object which these scheming confederates had in view was to 
draw into the Scioto speculation for their own gain, the public 
securities of the United States which were held in Europe, 
and to entice to the Ohio country those who were dismayed at 
the sudden murkiness which portended and accompanied the 
French Revolution. There was, moreover, a purpose to whet 
the eagerness to engage in such American ventures, now that 
Jefferson's consular convention with France was calculated to 
keep the United States subservient to that country, and that 
such participation was likely to prove advantageous to French 
commerce. The agent who was employed to accomplish this, 
after other agencies had failed, was Joel Barlow, a man now 
four-and-thirty years old, of Connecticut stock, who had just 
become known as one of the "• Hartford wits," and the author 
of The Vision of Columbus. Sailing from New York, he 
reached Havre on June 24, 1788, and was soon at his task in 
Paris. In what this agent did, he may have exceeded tlie 
authority committed to him, and in such acts his principals 
are relieved from complete responsibility for what followed. 
The next year, 1789, Barlow formed a company in Paris, and 
sold to it three million acres on the Ohio, west of the seven- 
teenth range. The payments for it were to run in part till 

Note. — Tlie map on tlie following pages is from a map, P/'iv fh:i ArJin/s flea Compngnies de 
VOhio et (hi Scioln, grnre p(tr P. F. Tardie.u, and used by Barlow in Paris to advance his decep- 
tive measures. It represents the " Seven Ranges " and the lands of the Ohio Company as 
" cleared anil inhaViited," and places the " Premiere Ville " as without the bounds of the Ohio 
Company, when it was within them. Marietta is called " Mariana." 



p— x/'- 




\.^ 


/ 


■ 


,^.-i> 


Tv 


•ITS 



\./'., //■.'/'.///.• iiir/v'.'- /iiotifrrii/ /a \ 




311 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

1794. To advance the speculation, Barlow caused to be turned 
into French an overdrawn description of the country, which 
Cutler had printed at Salem in 1787, couched in language 
showing the inevitable vices and devices of land speculators. 
This translation was published at Paris in 1789, and it was 
accompanied by a map, prepared by the associates in America, 
as Todd, Barlow's biographer admits, though he acknowledges 
that he keeps the worst side of the transaction out of sight. 
This map aimed to further the deceit, begun in Cutler's adver- 
tising description, and if that was drawn from Hutchins, the 
false statements of the ma^), representing both in the Seven 
Ranges and in the Ohio and Scioto Company's land a settled 
country, were certainly the associates' and Barlow's fabrications. 
Barlow, it may be allowed, was not alone in hopeful cheer for 
the future, if he was deceptive in the present, when he claimed 
that there would be in twenty years a larger population beyond 
the mountains than was then on the Atlantic slope, and that, 
" sooner or later," the capital of the whole country must be in 
the centre of it, for Hamilton not long before, in the federal 
convention, had prophesied a doubling of the representation in 
Congress in five-and-twenty years. 

If the business of the Scioto associates was a nefarious one, 
not a little of the mischance must be ascribed to the feverish 
condition of France. The infatuated Parisians were easily led 
to their ruin, and there is little evidence that they put Barlow's 
persuasions to any test, though existing caricatures, issued at 
the time, show that something like correct knowledge of the 
Ohio country existed, for one of them indicates a belief that 
the company were selling imaginary acres, and offering maps 
— as was the case — on which rocky deserts were represented 
as fertile plains and the territory was supplied with all the 
appurtenances of civilized life, while in but one corner of it a 
few pioneers were completely isolated in their incipient struggles 
with the wilderness. 

If this Scioto venture, as we shall later see, proved a grievous 
misery, an experiment more creditable to those concerned had 
taken place in the Miami country. In August, 1787, John 
Cleve Symmes, who was one of the three judges associated with 
St. Clair in the government of the northwest, ajiplied to the 



SYMMES'S COLONY. 315 

land office for a iiiillion acres lying between the Great and 
Little Miami, offering terms the same as the Ohio Company- 
had paid. The increasing demand for land had carried up the 
value of the military scrip, so that the completion of the trans- 
fer was not reached till May 15, 1788. Thomas Ludlow, a 
New Jersey man, who had made the survey, found that the 
million acres supposed to lie between the two Miamis were 
diminished to something over a quarter of that extent. In the 
following July, Synmies started to reach his grant. lie had 
fourteen four-horse wagons and about sixty persons in his train. 
With this equipment he landed from his barges at the Little 
Miami on September 22, 1788, accompanied by Ludlow, Den- 
man, and Filson, names associated with the beginnings of this 
venture. Here, on a site opposite to the spot where, coming 
from the Kentucky mountains, the Licking poured into the 
Ohio, they planned for a town, but before much could be done, 
the Indians prowled about in a hostile manner, and it was 
thought prudent to return to Limestone (Maysville), sixty miles 
up the river, on the Kentucky shore, where a settlement had been 
begun four years before. In November (1788), a party returned 
to the same spot and built a blockhouse. About Christmas, 
Denman, Ludlow, and another party left Limestone, and push- 
ing their boats through the floating ice-cakes, they landed on 
December 28, on the same ground. Some eight hundred acres 
of the immediate region had been bought by Mathias Denman 
and two others, whom he admitted to the enterprise, for some- 
thing less than two hundred and fifty dollars. In the party 
was John Filson, who was to employ his skill for surveying in 
laying out the streets of a town. It fell to Ludlow to take 
measurements, so as to find out where the purchased area 
began, at a spot twenty miles from the mouth of the Great 
IVIiami. Denman and Ludlow began to consider what name to 
give the projected settlement, and thought of Cincinnati, in 
commemoration of the society of which Washington was then 
the head : but Filson, who had been a schoolmaster, exercised 
his unpolished wits in fashioning a strange name. He was not 
quite sure which of the two endings to his conglomerated desig- 
nation he preferred, hurf/ or vUle ; but he had no doubt about 
the rest of the composition, and his pedantry i)revailed. So 
Losantiville was adopted, signifying the town (jville') opposite 



316 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

{antl') the mouth (os) of the Licking (X). When St. Clair 
hiter came upon the spot, he jjreferred Cincinnati, and the future 
city was saved a ridiculous designation. Filson, being soon 
killed by the Indians while venturing inland, was not destined 
to make a similarly bizarre combination of the city lines, and its 
streets were really laid out by Ludlow. 

This and other settlements in the neighborhood assured, Gen- 
eral Harmar sent a detachment to protect the colony, and on 
September 26, 1789, the troops began to erect a stockade on a 
reservation of fifteen acres. The post was named Fort Wash- 
ington, and in December Harmar, accompanied by about three 
hundred men out of the six hundred in his department, arrived 
and established there his headquarters. Cincinnati, under such 
military protection, outstrijiped the other neighboring settle- 
ments on the Great and Little Miami, and soon became the 
county seat. 

The use that was to be made of the Mississippi and its eastern 
affluents had now become a burning political problem. The stren- 
uous contention which Franklin had made in 1783 to secure the 
main current of that river as a boundary of the young Re^iub- 
lic had brought its sequel. The Ohio, which had already be- 
come the main avenue to the Kentucky and Cumberland regions, 
was now the principal approach to the new settlements on the 
northern banks. So long as the British retained the lake posts, 
the Ohio was to have no rival as a western route. Washington, 
soon after he became President, had addressed himself to this 
perplexing question. In October, 1789, he had asked St. Clair 
to investigate the portages between the Ohio basin and Lakes 
Erie and Michigan, as forming a connection with the posts, 
which he hoped now to demand with the weight of a better 
orjjanized povernment behind him. So he instructed Gouver- 
neur Morris to sound the British authorities about entering upon 
a commercial treaty. He also directed him to reopen the ques- 
tion of the posts, while Hamilton intimated to the British agent 
in New York that his government need no longer fear that 
the United States did not offer a stable administration to deal 
with. 

While this matter was pending, the use of the Mississippi was 



I 



THE MISSISSIPPI VOYAGE. 317 

a more vital consideration for tlie west. Tlie Ohio, from Pitts- 
burg- to the rapids at Louisville, had a course of ten hundred 
and seventy-four miles, as it was then reckoned. Hutchins 
had described it as carrying- " a great uniformity of breadth, 
from four hundred to six hundred yards, except at its confluence 
with the Mississippi and for a hundred miles above it, where it 
is a thousand yards wide. For the greater part of the way it 
has many meanders amid rising ground upon both sides. . . . 
The height of the banks admit everywhere of being- settled, as 
they are not liable to crumble away. . . . There is scarce a 
place between Fort Pitt and the rapids where a good road may 
not be made and horses employed in drawing- up large barges 
against a stream remarkably gentle, except in high freshes." 

A down voyage on the Ohio was easy and pleasant, barring 
the risk of the savage bullets, and the barges of the emigrants 
went on at three or four miles an hour in ordinary stages of 
the water ; but their progress was accelerated to double that 
speed in the spring- freshets. The return voyage was altogether 
trying. Any plan of an ocean commerce for the West by an 
outlet in the Gulf of Mexico presented so serious an obstacle 
in the stemming- of this current that the canal companies of 
Virginia derived their chief impulse from this obstruction in a 
rival route. 

From New Orleans to Louisville, now a town of some sixty 
dwellings, boats of forty tons, manned by eighteen and twenty 
hands, could hardly accomplish the trip in less than eight or ten 
weeks, — a voyage which the first steamboat which accomplished 
it made, in 1815, in five-and-twenty days. It was a serious 
question if any method could be devised to overcome this obsti- 
nate current so as to reduce this time. There were those who 
contended that some scheme of artificial propulsion, such as 
Kumsey and Fitch were now experimenting with, would yet 
reduce the cost of transportation on this up-voyage to a tenth 
of the expense of carriage by land and water from Philadelphia 
to tlie same point. When Cutler had tried to impress the sus- 
ceptible public l)y that vein of prophecy which blinded the 
poor settlers of Gallipolis, he added : " The current down the 
Ohio and Mississippi for heavy articles that suit the Florida 
and West India markets . . . will be more loaded than any 
stream on earth. ... It is found by late experiments that sails 



318 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

are used to great advantage against the current of the Ohio, 
and it is worthy of observation that, in all probability, steam- 
boats will be found to l)e of infinite service in all our river navi- 
gation/' Cutler himself had had hopes of substituting tlie screw 
for oars in the ordinary manual labor of the boats. In August, 
1788, he had tried an experiment on the Ohio, with the help 
of Tupper, in which he claimed to have " succeeded to admira- 
tion " in propelling a boat by a screw worked by hand. 

If this question of artificial propulsion was one factor in the 
Mississippi question, there was another in the opposition of 
Spain to the claim of the West to seek the ocean by the Gulf 
of Mexico, and Jay was soon aware that Spain " did not mean 
to be restricted to the limits established between Britain and 
the United States." In May, 1785, Gardoqui had come to 
negotiate a treaty of commerce in behalf of Spain. In confer- 
ences which he later had with Jay, it was proposed that the 
United States should abandon for twenty-five years all claims to 
descend the Mississippi to the Giilf in recompense for the com- 
mercial privileges which Spain, on those terms, was disposed to 
grant. Kufus King recounted the arguments of those ready to 
accede to this demand. He believed that if the free navigation 
of the Mississippi was secured, the east and west must sepa- 
rate, for the commerce of the west would inevitably follow the 
Mississippi. To populate the west would indeed make a mar- 
ket for the western lands, but the disposing of them at this 
risk would pay too dearly for replenishing the treasury of the 
country. He acknowledged that the ciy for the Mississippi 
was a popular one, but to insist on the point was a sure way to 
a war with Spain, and such a conflict, with a probable loss of 
territory and the fisheries, was too great a risk. Edward Rut- 
ledge of South Carolina told Jay that " the majority of those 
with whom I have conversed believed that we should be bene- 
fited by a cession of it [the Mississippi] to Spain for a limited 
time." 

Jay himself was ready to accede to the demand of Spain, but 
on bringing it to the attention of Congress, in August, 1786, it 
was apparent that the country had become clearly divided on 
the issue, and there was great heat in the controversy. The 
members from tlie South and West, with few such exceptions 
as Rutledge, insisted on opening that river in opposition to the 



I 



SPAIN AND THE MISSISSIPPI. 319 

commercial classes of the North, which valued the professed 
opportunities of trade even at the cost which Spain demanded. 
Otto wrote to Vergennes in September, 1786, that he feared the 
heated opposition of the two sections would lead to open advo- 
cacy of disunion. Jay's purposes had aroused Virginia. On 
March 1, 1787, Randolph wrote to Madison: " The occlusion 
of the Mississippi will throw the western settlers into an innne- 
diute state of hostility with Spain. If the subject be canvassed, 
it will not be sufficient to negative it merely, but a negative 
with some emphasis can alone secure Mr. Henry to the objects 
of the convention at Philadelphia." Mason said in the federal 
convention in July : " Spain might for a time deprive the west 
of their natural outlet for their productions, yet she will, be- 
cause she must, finally yield to their demands.'' Henry Lee, in 
August, when it seemed that Jay might carry his point, wrote 
to Washington : " The moment our western country becomes 
po])ulous and capable, they will seize by force what may have 
been yielded by treaty." In October, Lafayette said to Jay : 
" In a little time we must have the navigation, one way or the 
other, which I hope Spain may at last understand." In De- 
cember, Madison, observing as Randolph had done, represented 
to Washington that Patrick Henry, heretofore a warm advocate 
of the federal cause, was now become cold because of Jay's 
project, and was likely, if Congress acceded, to go over to the 
other side. Monroe and Grayson, to avoid a rupture, were 
inclined to compromise, so as to agree with Gardoqui that 
exports from the west should have free passage by the JNIissis- 
sippi, while imports should enter the Atlantic ports. 

As the months went on, the feeling in sympathy with the 
west increased. Jefferson wrote of Jay's project in January, 
1787, as " a relinquishment of five parts out of eight of the 
territory of the United States ; an abandonment of the fairest 
subject for the payment of our public debts, and the chaining 
of those debts on our own necks." If, by virtue of this deser- 
tion of the west, he added, " they declare themselves a separate 
people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them." In 
April, Harmar, at the rapids of the Ohio, found the question 
" the greatest subject of discourse," and the opinion prevailed 
there that, if the Spanish demands were met, it would be " the 
greatest of grievances." The Spaniards were warned tliat their 



320 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

obstinacy might throw the western people into the arms of 
England, who could offer them the St. Lawrence as an outlet. 
Brissot said that if Spain would only open the Mississippi, 
" New Orleans would become the centre of a lucrative com- 
merce." Brissot believed Spain woidd do this, except that she 
feared " the communication of those principles of independence 
which the Americans jJi'cach wherever they go." 

By February, 1787, Jay's party in Congress showed signs 
of weakening, and later, when New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and 
Rhode Island deserted him. Jay abandoned all hope. But 
Spain was firm for an exclusive use of the river, and the time 
was only put off when the question would come to an issue. 
Virginia might resolve, as her Assembly did on November 12, 
1787, that the free use of streams leading to the sea was guar- 
anteed " by the laws of God and man," but something more 
than legislative votes was necessary to secure the boon. There 
was a lingering suspicion that England, at the peace, had so 
readily yielded the western country because she was sure it 
would eventually involve the new Republic in controversy with 
Sj)ain, and rumors of a coming conflict were, as it now turned 
out, constantly in the air. Harmar wrote in January, 1788, 
to the secretary of war : " I very much question whether the 
Kentucky and Cumberland peoj)le and those below will have 
the audacity to attempt to seize Natchez and New Orleans. I 
know of no cannon and the necessary apparatus which they 
have in their possession to carry on such an expedition." It 
was at the time evident that though Kentucky had something 
like a hundred thousand pojmlation, the wiser course for attain- 
ing success was to bide the time when Spain and western 
Europe were embroiled in a war. 

The question, particularly in Virginia, entered into the dis- 
cussions over the adoption of the federal constitution, which, 
now that Massachusetts had adopted it, trusting to the future 
for amendments, was in a fair way to become the law of the 
land. Madison contended, in the debates in Richmond, that 
the constitution, by creating a strong government, would render 
the opening of the Mississippi certain. Patrick Henry doubted 
it much. " To preserve the balance of American power," he 
said, " it is essentially necessary that the right to the Mississippi 
should be secured." The distrust which Jay's purpose had 



I 



STEAMBOA TS. 321 

created was hard to eradicate. " This affair of the Mississij)pi," 
said Jefferson to Madison in June, 1789, "•' by showing that 
Congress is capable of hesitating on a question which proposes 
a clear sacrifice of the western to the maritime States, will with 
difficulty be obliterated." In a well-known letter which Rufus 
Putnam wrote to Fisher Ames in 1790, that leader of the Mari- 
etta settlement strove to show how nothing but necessity could 
wean the West from the East, while the seaboard towns must 
be the natural market for the western products ; but to preserve 
this mutual dependence, the Ohio region must be sustained by 
Congress in its demand for the free navigation of the Missis- 
sippi, and he urges Ames to press Congress to that conclusion. 

A second factor in the Mississippi problem was some method, 
as already indicated, of stemming its current by artificial 
means. We have seen in the preceding chajoter that, in 1784, 
Ilun)sey had gained the approbation of Washington for a me-_ 
chanical method of using setting-poles in ])ushing boats u])- 
stream. Very soon after this, he had grasped a notion of using 
steam for power, as indeed William Henry of Lancaster had 
siiggested to Andrew Ellicott as early as 1776. Rumsey's new 
notion was to use this power in forcing water out of the stern 
which had been taken in at the bow, and in this way to propel 
the boat. In the antumn of 1784, the legislatures of Virginia 
and Maryland had granted him the exclusive use of the inven- 
tion in their waters. At the same time (November) he com- 
municated his plans to Washington, but they did not gain his 
full confidence. On March 10 of the next year (1785), he 
wrote to Washington : " I have quite convinced myself that 
boats may be made to go against the current of the Missis- 
sippi or Ohio rivers . . . from sixty to a hundred miles a day." 

It is difficult to reconcile all the conflicting statements circu- 
lated and vouched for by Rumsey and his rival, John Fitch, 
each claiming priority in the use of steam. It is certain that in 
March, 1785, Fitch, who had traveled much in the western 
country, and was countenanced by Ilutchins, professed with 
some little reserve to Patrick Henry that -his knowledge of the 
northwest was not equaled by that of any other man, and that 
he intended to put his knowledge to use in the construction of 
a map of that region, which he soon actually executed, cutting 



322 



THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 



.c'.V^^^^Voo^ 




Note. — The above cut is a sketcli from Fitcli's map. T)ie dol-and-dush line is the boundary 
on Canada. The dash line defines the western part of Pennsylvania. The dot lines show the 
bounds of the proposed States under the ordinance of 1784. There are various legends on the 
map in the places indicated by the capital letters, thus : — 

A. A map of the northwest parts of the United States of America. 

B. The several divisions on the N. W. of the Ohio is the form which that country is to be laid 
off into States according to an ordinance of Congress of May the '20"i, 1785. 

C. The author presents this to the public as the production of his leisure hours, and flatters 
himself that altho' it is not perfect, few capital errors will be found in it. He has not attempted 
to take the exact meanders of the Waters, but only their general course. In forming this map 
he acknowledges himself to have been indebted to the ingenious labours of Thomas Hutchins and 
Will'"' HP Murray^ Esq's. But from his own surveys and observations he was led to hope he 
could make considerable improvements on those and all that have gone before him. How far he 
has succeeded is now submitted to the impartial public by their very hble serv', John Fitch. 



FITCH'S MAP. 323 

the copper himself, and working off the copies in a hand-press 
of his own construction. He had hopes that, by traversing the 
country and selling his maps, he could obtain what money he 
needed to carry out a project which seems very soon afterwards 
to have entered his mind. He later claimed that when the 
conception of using steam to propel a boat against the current 
of the western waters dawned upon him, he had not heard that 
any one had ever broached the idea. The scheme, when he 
advanced it, did not altogether commend itself to those who 
had had experience with the Ohio and Mississippi currents, and 
Jacob Yoder, who, it appears, was the first to take a boat with 
merchandise to New Orleans, had expressed his distrust. Fitch, 
with his earnest vigor, set to work on a model, and before long 
had it afloat on a little stream in Pennsylvania. It was a boat 
propelled by paddle-wheels. On August 29, he wrote to the 
president of Congress that he had invented a machine to facili- 

D. To Thomas Hutchins, Esqr., Geographer to the United States. Sir : It is with the greatest 
diffidence I beg leave to lay at your feet a very humble attempt to promote a science of wliich you 
are so briglit an ornament. I wish it were more wortliy your patronage. Unaccustomed to tlie 
business of engraving, I could not render it as pleasing to the eye as I would have wished. But, 
as I flatter myself, will be easily forgiven by a gentleman, who knows how to distinguish between 
form and substance in all things. I have the hon' to be, sir, your very hble serv', John Fitch. 

E. The falls of Niagara are at present in the middle of a plane about five miles back from 
the summit of the mountain, over which the waters once tumbled, we may suppose. The action 
of the water in a long course of time, has worn away the solid rock and formed an immense ditch 
which none may approach without horror. After falling perpendicular 150 feet (as some have 
computed) it continues to descend in a rapid seven miles further to the Landing place. 

F. Copper ore in great abundance found here. 

G. Tlie falls of St. Anthony exhibit one of the grandest spectacles in nature ; the waters dasli- 
ing over tremendous rocks from a height of about forty feet perpendicular. 

H. From Fort Lawrance and thence to the mouth of Sioto, a westerly course to the Illinois is 
generally a rich level country abounding with living springs and navigable waters ; the air pure 
and the climate moderate. 

I. This country has once been settled by a people more expert in the art of war than the pres- 
ent inhabitants. Regular fortifications, and some of these incredibly large are frequently to be 
foinid. Also many graves or towers, like pyramids of earth. 

.1. Pioria's wintering ground. 

K. On the Miamis are a large number of Indian towns, inhabited by Shawanoes, Delawares, 
Mingos, &c. 

L. The lands on this lake are generally flat and swamp}' ; but will make rich pasture and 
meadow land. 

M. From Fort Lawrance to the mouth of Yellow Creek and northward to the waters of Lake 
Erie is generally a thin soil and broken land. 

N. From the mouth of Sioto to Fort Lawrance, between that line and the Ohio, the soil is tol- 
erable good ; but generally nnich broken with sharp hills. 

P. From the Pennsylvania line to Great Sandy, and thence a southwesterly course to the 
Carolina line, is generally very poor land and very inountanous, rocky and broken. 

Q. Tlie Kentucky country is not so level as it is generally represented to be, there being a 
range of hilly land, running thro' it N. E. & S. W. ; also very deep valleys on the larg streams. 

R. Ironbanks, settled in the year SO and evacuated the same year. 

The original map, from which this sketch is made, is in Harv.ard College library, and I have 
heard of but one other copy. A photograph of it, nearly full size, was taken for the late Judge 
C. 0. Baldwiu of Cleveland. 



324 THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED. 

tate internal navigation, and laid his plans before that body. 
In September, he outlined his scheme to the American Philo- 
sophical Society, and eight or ten weeks later, on December 2, 
he offered a model for their consideration. 

Meanwhile, Fitch had petitioned the Virginia Assembly for 
aid in pushing his invention, and Governor Henry entered into 
a bond with him, by which Fitch agreed that if he could sell 
a thousand copies of his map at six shillings each, he would 
exhibit his steamboat in Virginia, giving " full proof of the 
practicability of moving by the force of a steam engine ... a 
vessel of not less than one ton burthen." This agreement was 
dated on November 16, 1785, and Fitch was to forfeit .£350 if 
the conditions were not fulfilled. The maps were not sold, and 
he lost the aid of Virginia. He successively asked, but without 
avail, similar assistance from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New 
Jersey. He had had before this, in September, an interview 
with Gardoqui. To induce the Spanish minister to patronize the 
scheme, he had set forth the future of the west under the influ- 
ence of such an invention, and had given him a copy of his map. 
He had intimated, also, an alternative project of working his 
paddles by horses. Gardoqui sought first to secure an exclusive 
right to Spain in the results, and to this Fitch would not agree. 
He now resorted to forming a company in Philadeljdiia, where 
he had received the aid of a Dutch mechanic, Voight by name, 
and in the summer of 1786, he made some experimental trips 
with a new craft on the Delaware, attempting, on July 20, to 
use a screw, and doing better a week later with paddles. This 
furthered his plan of subscription, but when Franklin offered 
him a gratuity, instead of a subscription, he confesses he was 
stimg to the quick. In' December, 1786, he printed in the 
Columbian Magdzine a description of his boat, with a cut of 
the little craft, and this still more animated the public interest. 
A new vessel, forty-five feet long, with upright paddles, was com- 
pleted in the following May, 1787, and on August 22 he made 
an exhibition of it on the Delaware for the delectation of the 
members of the federal convention. This gave him some addi- 
tional notoriety, and he announced a scheme of building a boat 
for lake use with two keels. He proposed, also, to edge its 
wheels with spikes, so that in winter it could be run on the ice 
at thirty miles an hour. 



FITCH AND RUMSEY. 325 

Though there is some discrepancy in evidence as to the date, 
it would seem that his final success was achieved in the spring- 
of 1788, when he moved a vessel called the " Perseverance," of 
sixty tons burthen, for eight miles on the Schuylkill. Brissot, 
who saw the experiment, says that the power was exerted by 
" three large oars of considerable force, which were to give 
sixty strokes a minute." In July, he used stern paddles in a 
trial on the Delaware, and went twenty miles. Notwithstand- 
ing this, Fitch did not escape ridicule from the incredulous, and 
Brissot expresses some indignation " to see Americans discour- 
aging him by their sarcasms." 

The now active rivalry of Rumsey added personal bitterness 
to the controversy between them, as shown in a pamphlet which 
was printed. Rumsey, being as impecunious as his antagonist, 
had sought in the same way to get the assistance of the legis- 
latures of some of the States. He claimed in his memorials 
that his boat could make twenty-five to forty miles a day against 
a strong current, using for the power a current of water taken 
in at the bow and ejected at the stern. 

When Rumsey memorialized the Virginia Assembly in 1785, 
the project was thought chimerical, and gained no attention 
till Washington, to whom he had disclosed his method, gave 
him a certificate. It was not till the early winter of 1787 that 
he made a public trial of a boat, eighty feet long, on the Poto- 
mac, making three miles an hour on December 3, and four miles 
on December 11. 

While Fitch was, by his experiments, creating some enthusi- 
asm in Philadelphia in 1788, Rumsey was making promises in 
England, and foretelling the possibility of crossing the ocean 
in fifteen days. He died of apoplexy four years later (Decem- 
ber 23, 1792), a disappointed man. Some abortive attempts 
had l)een made in Scotland by Miller in 1788, and by Synn'ng- 
ton in 1800, to solve the problem, but the first real success did 
not come till 1807, when Fulton ran the " Clermont " on the 
Hudson, and when, two years later (November, 1809), the " Ac- 
commodation " steamed from Montreal to Quebec in thirty-six 
hours of actual progress, having anchored on three nights. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

1783-1786. 

The peace of 1783 had brought no better security south of 
the Ohio than had been attained on the north of it. 

In May, 1782, just as the English cabinet was making up its 
mind to grant the independence of the Ct^lonies, a Kentucky 
German, Jacob Yoder, had pushed off from Redstone on the 
Monongahela, in a big boat laden with flour, to risk the passage 
to New Orleans, and reap, if he could, some profit from his 
venture. He was fortunate. The Spanish authorities on the 
Mississippi were waiting then for the outcome of the war, and 
had no reason to stop this adventurous trader, who had suc- 
cessfully run the gauntlet of the Indians. He reached New 
Orleans in safety and sold his flour for furs. These skins he 
took to Havana, where he bartered them for sugar, which in 
turn he shipped to Philadelphia. With much money in his 
pocket, the result of his speculation, he recrossed the mountains 
to his Kentucky home. 

Meanwhile, the negotiations at Paris were hurrying to a close, 
and when it became known that by a secret provision of that 
treaty, England and the States, in order to reconcile their dis- 
cordant views, had agreed in any event to ignore the Spanish 
claim to territory above 31°, there was no chance of Yoder's 
venture being repeated, and such peaceful commerce soon gave 
place to stagnation on the river, only relieved by an occasional 
freebooting sally of the wild Cumberland frontiersmen, who 
wanted to get what si)ort and plunder they could out of harrying 
the Spanish settlements along the river. Cruzat, commanding at 
St. Louis, complained to Robertson of these lawless acts ; but it 
was difficult to fasten responsibility anywhere, though the au- 
thorities at Nashborough labored to prevent such incursions. 

For twelve years or more to come, Spain was to be the covert 



SPANISH HOSTILITY. 327 

enemy of the new Republic. All this while she was seeking to 
lure any who would act in concert with her, both among- the 
wild tribes of the southwest and among the almost as wild 
frontiersmen of the outlying settlements of the confedex-acy and 
the later Union. Events seemed at times distinctly fashioned 
for her advantage. The whites in Georgia and along the Ten- 
nessee were recklessly invading the Indian lands, and inciting 
them to retaliate. Before the Revolutionary War had closed, 
it had seemed plain to Governor Harrison of Virginia that 
bounds must be agreed upon to restrain the white squatters, 
and he and Governor Martin of North Carolina had con- 
sulted in November, 1782, about appointing commissioners to 
settle a line. When Pickering, in April, 1783, was planning 
a peace establishment, he had ])rovided for the southwest only a 
modest quarter of the eight hundred troops which he destined 
to garrison the exposed posts, as a protection against the dan- 
gers to be apprehended from " the Indians and the Spanish." 
As early as May 31, 1783, a treaty had been made at Augusta 
with the Cherokees, and later (November) with the Creeks, by 
which the Americans secured the title to a tract of land west 
of the Tngaloo River, but the result failed to secure the ap 
proval of the great body of those tribes ; nor was the warlike 
faction of the Creeks won by other agreements, which had been 
made with the same tribe and the Chickasaws, in July and 
November. The Creeks and their Spanish backers were thus 
become a serious problem in the soutliwest. 

The general peace of 1782 had been a vexatious one to the 
court at Madrid. Spain had not secured Gibraltar, as she had 
hoped to do, and matters on the Mississi]ipi. with the understand- 
ing that existed between England and her now independent 
colonies, were no less a disa]:)pointment. Lafayette, who in the 
spring of 1783 had been in Madrid, wrote thence to Livingston, 
the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, that he " cotdd see tliat 
American independence gave umbrage to the Spanish ministry." 

Before the war closed, Virginia had already ]n'essed her 
claim to an extension to the Mississi]ipi, where Clark had built 
Fort Jefferson, but North Carolina had never officially pushed 
her jurisdiction beyond tlie momitains till in May, 1783, her 
legislature by an act stretched her southei-n boundary by the 
parallel of 36° 30' likewise to the Mississippi. This enactment 



328 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

was not only a warning to Spain that her claim to the eastern 
bank of the Mississippi would be contested, but it also showed 
the people of the Holston and Cumberland valleys that they 
had not escaped the jurisdiction of the parent State in going 
westward to subdue the wilderness. Both of these settlements 
had steadily grown. There was perhaps a population of' three 
thousand five hundred souls in the Cumberland district. The 
older communities along the Clinch and the Holston had begun 
to form some of those religious consolidations which .the Metho- 
dist communion carries in its spreading circles, while the 
Scotch-Irish in southwestern Virginia and in the neighboring 
parts of Kentucky and Tennessee had set up the presbytery of 
Abingdon, an offshoot of the larger one of Hanover, which had 
been formed in 1749. 

In this extension of her western jurisdiction North Carolina 
had not failed to reserve a certain tract of this territory for the 
use of the Indians ; but she had done it of her own option, and 
without consulting the tribes. This was an arrogant act, which 
the Creeks quickly resented. 

The Kentucky settlements between the Cumberland and the 
Ohio had, in March, 1783, been divided by the Virginia authori- 
ties into three counties. The principal seat of local business 
was at first placed at Harrodsburg, but later at Danville. 
These settlements showed signs of civil regularity which did 
not prevail to the south of them, and invited renewed immi- 
gration. This in some part pursued the Virginia path by the 
Cumbei-land Gap, following what was knowaa as the Wilderness 
Eoad, which, however, was but a mere bridle trace for pack- 
horses. The larger part of the migration floated down the Ohio 
from Pittsburg, which had just been formally laid out as a town 
by the agents of the Penns, with a population of about a thou- 
sand. As a rule, however, the Virginia emigrant struck the 
Ohio ninety miles below, at Wheeling, and thereby avoided 
some of the difficidties of the shoaler water between that point 
and Pittsburg. In either case they disembarked, as had been 
the custom from the beginning, at Limestone, and thence made 
their way over a well-beaten road to the valleys of the Licking 
and Kentucky, not failing to remark how the buffalo had de- 
serted their old traces, and taken to the less-frequented portions 
of the country. It is not easy to determine with accuracy the 



McGILLIVRAY. 329 

extent of this inflow during the years immediately following the 
peace ; but it has been reckoned as high as twelve or fifteen 
thousand a twelvemonth, with proportionate trains of pack- 
horses and cattle. These numbers included, doubtless, a due 
share of about four thousand European immigrants, who sought 
the States yearly. 

Whenever these wanderers encountered the red man, it was 
not difficult for the new-comers to discover that, to the savage 
mind, the enforced transfer of allegiance from the English crown 
to the new Republic was a change that wronged and incensed 
the victims of it. To the military man, who was not an uncom- 
mon member of the new emigration and who had seen service 
imder Bradstreet and Sullivan, this attitude of the Indian mind 
boded no little mischief. 

The restless conditions of the tribes in the southwest offered 
to Miro, now the Spanish commander at New Orleans, an 
opportunity for conference and intrigue. The way was opened 
by the ceaseless endeavors of Alexander McGillivray to form 
a league of the southern tribes against the Americans, in order, 
with Spanish countenance and with a simultaneous revolt on 
the part of the northern tribes, to force the exposed settlers 
back upon the seaboard. The scheme was a daring one, and 
no such combination among the redskins had been attempted 
since the conspiracy of Pontiac. But McGillivray, with all his 
craft, had little of the powers of mind which the Ottawa chief 
had possessed, and his efforts fell short of even the temporary 
success which Pontiac had achieved. McGillivray was a half- 
breed Creek, whose mother was of a chief family of that nation. 
His father was a Scotchman. He had something of the Scotch 
hard-headedness, and had received an education by no means 
despicable. Adhering to the royal side in the late war, liis 
pro])erty had been confiscated, and he was now adrift, harbor- 
ing hatred towards the Americans, while he was not amiable 
towards the British, wlio had betrayed, as he claimed, himself 
and his race. As early as January 1, 1784, he had communi- 
cated with the Spanish commander at Pensacola, with a propo- 
sition for a Spanish alliance. He also intimated the possibility 
of detaching the over-mountain settlements from the confeder- 
acy, maintaining that the west contained two classes of discon- 
tents, who might well be induced to play into the hands of 



330 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

Spain. One of these included the tribes, indignant at the 
desertion of them by Great Britain. The other was the body of 
Tories now tracking over the mountains to begin a new career, 
mingled with runaways escaping the federal tax-gatherers. 

On such representations Miro was ready in May, 1784, to 
hold conferences with these southwestern tribes. On the 22d, 
he met representatives of the Chickasaws, Alabamas, and Choc- 
taws at Mobile, and sanctioned a treaty of friendship and 
mutual support, while he enjoined upon them the necessity of 
refraining from taking scalps or otlierwise maltreating their 
j)risoners. On the 80th, he met McGillivray and a large body 
of Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickamaugas at Pensacola, and 
entered into a like agreement. By the 6th of June, this half- 
breed chieftain was on his way back to the tribal centres, bear- 
ing promises of full supplies and munitions from the Spanish 
posts. The desidtory conflict which followed tiirough a course 
of years, known as the Oconee war, was on the whole a great 
disappointment to McGillivray, for he never succeeded for any 
length of time in making the Creeks and their abettors main- 
tain a solid front for the task which he had set. 

While this savage warfare kept the frontiers anxious, the 
sinister purposes of Spain were only partly veiled in her at- 
tempts to aid the Indians. The federal government knew per- 
fectly, as Pickering had intimated, that the enmity of Spain 
was a constant factor in this southwestern problem. Lafayette, 
in February, 1783, had written to Livingston from Cadiz that 
" among the Spanish, the Americans have but few well-wishers, 
and their government will insist upon a pretended right all 
along the left shore of the Mississippi." 

During the summer of 1783, there were constant attempts of 
the Spaniards to stop American boats trading on the Mississippi, 
and it was believed that the renewed activity of the Indian 
depredations along the Ohio was by their instigation. To 
prevent these evils, the Kentucky people looked to the parent 
State in vain. They soon discovered that with military move- 
ments directed from WilHamsbui'g, as the militia laws required, 
delays interposed that were dangerous, while self-protection 
could not allow hesitancy of action. This led them to consider 
the advantages of autonomy, while its necessity and justice were 
not unrecocfuized in the tide-water resfion of Viririnia. Wash- 



BENJAMIN LOGAN. 331 

ington was outspoken, and favored confining the western limits 
of the old State to a meridian cutting the mouth of the Great 
Kanawha. He revealed to Hamilton his anxiety when he told 
him that, unless such concessions were made, it would take but 
the touch of a feather to turn the western people to other mas- 
ters. Jefferson wrote to Madison that Viroinia ouoht to let 
Kentucky go, and that promptly, lest all the over-mountain 
people should unite, when Congress would sustain their claim, 
to make the mountains instead of the Kanawha the boundary. 
He thought it no small advantage for Virginia to have the 
hundred miles and more of mountains beyond that river as a 
barrier between the two States. 

Filson, a Pennsylvania schoolmaster who had turned sur- 
veyor, had lately run through these Kentucky settlements and 
estimated their population at about thirty thousand. His map, 
made at this time, shows fifty-two settlements and eighteen 
scattered houses. He had also just published an account of 
Kentucky, in which he had had the aid of Daniel Boone, 
David Todd, and James Harrod. Boone had also connected 
the earl}^ days of the pioneers with the present in a sketch of 
his life, which Filson had taken down at the dictation of his 
friend. 

Tlie movement which McGillivray was inciting at the south 
grew to look ominous. In this crisis Colonel Benjamin Logan 
assembled his militia captains at Danville to take measures for 
protection. This body of counselors was law-abiding enough to 
shrink from any movement not purely defensive, but their mili- 
tary organization, in the absence of civil control, opportunely 
offered the best initiative towards a representative convention 
to be held at Danville on December 27. Still holding to the 
military divisions of the people, it was directed that a single 
delegate from each company should be elected to attend. When 
the convention met, the question of withdrawing from the gov- 
ernment of Virginia divided the conference. In this uncer- 
tainty it was readily seen that independence was rather a civil 
than military question. Accordingly, a new notice was issued, 
recommending the people, by delegates, to be assembled at Dan- 
ville in May, 1785, to take the problem into full consideration. 

Note. — The map on the two following pages is the principal part of Filson's map of Ken- 
tucky. 




1 



nj crFcrfe. 




334 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

While this Kentucky movement was making progress under 
the forms of law, more headlong action was taken beyond the 
mountains of North Carolina, which for a while threatened 
serious complications. That State, in her Bill of Rights in 177G, 
had anticipated tlie formation of one or more other States in 
due time out of her western territory. There had been laid, 
as we have seen, in this over-mountain region, the foundations 
of two separate communities. They were destined to be united 
in one commonwealth, but they held at this time little commu- 
nication with each other, though the more distant was sprung, 
as it were, from the loins of the nearer. The one in which 
James Robertson was the leading spirit was scattered in the 
valley of the Cumberland, tributary to Nashborough, or Nash- 
ville, as it was now becoming the fashion to call the collection 
of huts which bore that name. Miro had already his eye upon 
Robertson as a likely ally in his future schemes, while yet he 
was sending him friendly messages, explaining how he was 
doing what he could to restrain the savages who were raiding 
the Cumberland frontiers. The time was not yet ripe for the 
Spanish intriguer to show his hand in this region. 

Farther east, the country originally settled from Virginia, 
and lying just below the southwestern corner of that State, was 
the valley in which the Watauga Association had moulded a 
self-centred community. With its growth the North Cai-olina 
legislature had divided the region into four counties, — Wash- 
ington, Green, Sullivan, and Davidson, and all but the last were 
infected with the same unrest as was pervading Kentucky. 
These settlements were separated from the support of North 
Carolina by the mountains on the east, while in the west it was 
a long distance beyond the Cumberland Gap before the more 
western communities were reached. Their closest ties were 
with their neighbors across the Virginia line on the north, and 
near it their principal town, Jonesboro', was built. This Wa- 
tauga region — as a whole it might be called — lay between the 
Alleghany and Cumberland mountains, and was drained by the 
Clinch, Ilolston, and other tributaries of the Tennessee. It was 
exposed towards the southwest by the course of that river, along 
which it was open to inroads of the Cherokees, and particularly 
of the Chickamaugas, the most relentless branch of that tribe. 
It was also in this direction that the settlements looked to 



JONESBOR& CONVENTION. 335 

increase their territory, and they had already begun to extend 
beyond the agreed allotments by the tribes, and were building 
stockades in close proximity to the Indian villages. The peace 
of the valley was still farther jeopardized by the occupation in 
February, 1784, of a tract of territory near the great bend of 
the Tennessee in the present State of Alabama, under a move- 
ment led by Sevier and Blount. The position was too ad- 
vanced for support, and had soon to be abandoned under the 
savage threats. With this aggressive temper, the authorities 
of North Carolina had little sympatliy, and the frontiersmen 
complained that the legislature made no appropriations for 
gifts with which to ajjpease the plundered savages. 

At this juncture the state Assembly at Hillsborough, in 
June, 1784, voted to cede to the confederacy their charter lands 
lying west of the mountains and extending to the Mississippi. 
This cession covered twenty-nine million acres, and the act gave 
Congress two years in which to accept it. The report of this 
action, spreading over the mountains, was all that was neces- 
sary to arouse the rebellious spirit of a people who felt that 
without their concurrence they were cast off by the parent State 
and left to shift for themselves. It was to them, at least, ap- 
parent that if they were to find any protection against their 
hostile neighbors, in the interval before the acceptance by Con- 
gress of the cession, it was to be in their own vigilance. 

In this state of affairs a convention met at Jonesboro' on 
August 23, 1784, and organized under the presidency of Sevier. 
It was agreed by delegates of the three counties already named, 
and by a two-thirds vote, that they be erected at once into an 
independent State. When this decision was known to the 
rabble of hunters and woodsmen who surrounded the court- 
house, there were shouts of turbulent joy. The convention 
framed an address, setting forth the plan and advantages of 
independence, and determined on holding another convention 
in November, to adopt a constitution. It was decided to appeal 
to Congress for countenance and advice as to the ])roposed con- 
stitution. There was a dispositicm to induce the contiguous 
part of Virginia to join in the movement. This was a note 
which alarmed tlie authorities at Williamsburg, and Patrick 
Henry saw in it the finger of the Sjjanish devil. 

While these things were taking place at Jonesboro', the legis- 



336 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

lature at New Berne, taking- alarm, repealed the act of cession. 
This reversal for a while tempered the impetuosity of the Sepa- 
ratists in the valley, and when a new body of delegates convened 
in November, it was found that the party for independence had 
lost strength, and the convention broke up amid a confusion of 
aims. Governor Martin took advantage of the seeming disper- 
sion of the rebellious party, and invested Sevier with a commis- 
sion and authority to lead the disaffected back to their loyalty. 
In December, accordingly, we find the man who had been 
counted upon to perfect the revolutionary scheme, and who was 
yet to head the revived movement, doing his best to hold the 
people to obedience to the laws. 

So the year 1784 ended with great uncertainty as to the 
political future of the three leading communities west of the 
mountains. In Kentuck}^, the soberer sense of the people plainly 
deprecated any hasty action. In the Holston region it seemed 
as if a division of public opinion would delay action, at least. 
At Nashville, in its remote situation, more connected with Ken- 
tucky than with the Holston region, there was nothing as yet to 
incite alarm. 

How far these initial measures for independence were made 
with Spanish concurrence is not clear ; but it is not probable 
that Miro had as yet ventured upon any direct assurance of 
sujjport. The Spanish authorities, however, were certainly 
cognizant of McGillivray's aims and hopes. 

The Americans, when the United States made Oliver Pol- 
lock its agent at Havana, had already lost a vigilant friend 
at New Orleans, who might now have divined what time has 
since disclosed. He left the Mississippi for his new mission in- 
debted to the royal treasury in the sum of $151,696, which he 
had borrowed to assist the American cause in the days when 
Spain was playing with the sympathies of the struggling col- 
onies. At this time, while Virginia was perplexed with her 
western problem. Pollock was imprisoned in Havana during 
eighteen months for debts which he had incurred in her behalf, 
a rigor doubtless instigated by the changed feelings which 
Spain was harboring towards the new Republic. 

There was little doubt in the minds of Congress that a strug- 



OPENING OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 337 

gle with Spain was imminent for the control of the Mississippi. 
Lafayette, who had written from Madrid such unassuring- opin- 
ions of the Spanish temper, had now returned to the States, 
and in Baltimore he disclosed to Madison his belief in the 
determination of the Madrid cabinet to stand by what they 
deemed their interest in the matter. Madison was so impressed 
both with Lafayette's assurances and with the absolnte neces- 
sity of thwarting Spain in her purpose, that he saw no way of 
avoiding a war except for France and Britain to intervene 
jointly, and profit by the trade that the free navigation of the 
Mississippi would bring them. America's demand, as Madi- 
son formulated it, was not only for the free nse of the river, 
but for an entrepot below 32'', for he felt assured the west 
wonld never consent to shift the lading of their descending 
boats to sea-going vessels higher up the river. Free trade down 
the stream would make, he contended. New Orleans one of the 
most flourishing emporiums of the world, and Spain ought to 
see it. The French in New Orleans, he again affirmed, cannot 
be denied this trade by their Spanish masters. 

While all these views were common, Congress on June 3, 
1784, instructed its diplomatic agents that the navigation of the 
Mississippi must in any event be rendered free. 

During 1785, events took a more decided color from Spanish 
diplomacy. The opening of the Mississippi became with the 
])ossession of the northern posts the two objects nearest the 
heart of the west. In January, Madison said discouragingly, 
" We must bear with Spain for a while," and trust to the future 
to develop a sale for onr western lands through the opening of 
the Mississippi. " All Europe," he added, " who wishes to 
trade with us, knows that to make these western settlements 
flourish is their gain." To such terms Lafayette replied : 
■' Spain is such a fool that allowances must be made." Just 
what these allowances might be were soon to be disclosed, when 
Don Diego de Gardoqui, with the ultimatum of Spain, arrived 
in Philadelphia in May, 1785. He did not present his creden- 
tials till July 2, and at that time Jay was authorized by Con- 
gress to treat with liim. 

Meantime, the rumors from the west made people fearful of 
they knew not what sudden developments. It was heard with 



338 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

alarm that Georgia had sent messengers to New Orleans, de- 
manding the surrender of Natchez, only to be rebuffed by 
Miro with a profession that he had no authority to comply. 
It was not this so much as the assurance of a single State in 
exercising diplomatic functions in violation of the federal com- 
pact that seemed serious. It was well known that Washington 
did not share the impatience of his southern brethren about the 
Mississippi. He looked upon delay in the settlement with 
Spain as likely to promote what he deemed of more importance, 
- — the development of trade channels across the mountains. In 
June, 1785, he wrote to Marbois : " The emigration to the 
waters of the Mississij^pi is astonishingly great, and chiefly of 
a description of people who are not very subordinate to the 
laws and constitution of the State they go from. Whether the 
prohibition, therefore, of the Spaniards is just or unjust, politic 
or impolitic, it will be with difficulty that people of this class 
can be restrained in the enjojnnent of natural advantages." 
Again, on September 7, Washington wrote to Rochambeau : 
"I do not think the navigation of the Mississippi is an object 
of great importance to us at present," and he added that it 
might be left till the full-grown west would have it '^ in spite of 
all opposition." 

Apprehensions of difficulty prevailed, when, on July 26, Jay 
began his negotiations with Gardoqui. The American secre- 
tary very soon saw that the Spanish agent would interpose few 
direct hindrances to a treaty of commerce whereby the Atlantic 
ports would profit. Jay knew that there was nothing which 
the country needed more than a season of business i)rosperity. 
Taxes were burdensome, and tliose who could were flying across 
the mountains to escape the gatherers of them. To pay such 
demands and to appease England by meeting her claims for 
debts, commercial opportunities were needed. But it soon be- 
came evident to Jay that Spain had no intention of enriching 
the Americans except by acquiring corresponding advantages 
to herself, and these were the best security for her claims on 
the Mississippi in the absolute control of its navigation. To 
meet such demands Jay could do nothing while Congress ad- 
hered to the vote, which we have seen was passed a year before, 
that in any event the Great River must be left open. Nothing 
which Jay could suggest weakened the firmness of Gardoqui 



JAMES WILKINSON. 339 

on this point. So there grew in the American's mind the be- 
lief that all would go well if Congress would consent to yield 
the Mississippi for a term of years — say twenty-five — with- 
out prejudice to later claims. This, he thought, would certainly 
satisfy the Northern States, which were to gain most by com- 
mercial privileges, while the South and West might agree that 
any imperative demand for the free navigation of the river 
would not arise for a generation. This was known to be Wash- 
ington's view of the exigency. Virginia had just appointed 
commissioners to open a wagon road from the head of James 
. liiver to the Kanawha falls, and beyond to Lexington, in Ken- 
tucky. Washington claimed that it was likely to be cheajier 
to carry western produce through the mountains to tide-water 
than down the Mississippi, if it started from any point east of 
the Kanawha, or even from the falls of the Ohio. Congress, 
hesitating in such a belief, on August 25 instructed Jay to 
close no agreement with Gardoqui without their approval. 

While the thrifty German and slovenly Celt were raising 
more flour in Kentucky than could possibly be consumed, there 
was small chance that any scheme of closing the great channel 
of western commerce for a lifetime would find favor. Nor, 
indeed, could any plan of repressing the marvelous expansion of 
the west be acceded to. Before Jay began his negotiations, he 
had written to Lafayette that this western increase was going 
on "with a degree of rapidity heretofore unknown," and that it 
would continue, " notwithstanding any attempts of anybody to 
prevent it." 

The jsrevalence of views in the East and in Congress antago- 
nistic to western progress, as they were deemed, could but arouse 
the latent spirit of independence which we have seen existed 
in more than one over-momitain region. They particularly 
aroused a recent comer to Kentucky, who was gifted with all 
that makes for subtle leadership and unscrupulous political 
daring, — a smooth affability, a cunning mind, a ready speech, 
and a fascinating address. The possessor of these insinuating- 
qualities was James Wilkinson, an officer of the Revolution, 
who, in 1784, had resigned the adjutant-generalship of Pennsyl- 
vania and had appeared in Lexington. His reputation, even 
then, was not without tarnish, but he had left suspicions behind, 
and had thrown himself at once into mercantile life. The men 



340 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

he dealt with had little cause to inquire sharply into a charac- 
ter which Roosevelt not undeservedly calls " the most despicable 
in our history." Wilkinson was soon vigilant as a speculator 
in skins and salt, — sharp enough, doubtless, but where every- 
body about him was a rasping bargainer, he was not conspic- 
uous for moral delinquencies. He wrote to a friend, whom 
he had left in Philadelphia : " If I can hold up cleverly for a 
couple of years, I shall lay the foundation of opulence for pos- 
terity." He claimed to the same correspondent that " his local 
credit and consequence, vanity apart, were not inconsiderable." 
He always had had a belief in his star. 

At the time when delegates met in May, 1785, to consider 
the question of independency, Wilkinson was too ill to attend, 
and we very likely owe it to his absence that the convention 
persisted in holding to constitutional grounds, and agreed to 
solicit the permission of Virginia to become a separate State. 
It also took an advanced stand in political policy when the 
members declared for equal representation and manhood suf- 
frage, as against the Virginia practice of equal county repre- 
sentation irrespective of population. In order to make the 
circulation of an address effective, it was also detei?mined in 
the convention to set up a printing-press. 

It was Wilkinson's boast that determinate action was delayed 
till another meeting in August, in order that the members 
might have the advantage of his presence. When, on August 
14, the new convention met, he made a passionate demand 
for an immediate unconditional separation from Virginia. He 
claimed that he had been at the start one of those adverse 
to independence; but that the renegade spirit in Congress on 
the Mississippi question had convinced him of the necessity 
of such action. Before the members assembled, he had again 
advised his distant friend that " free ti-ade out of the Missis- 
sippi would push Kentucky most rapidly. Our products are 
so prodigious," he added, " that our exports would exceed our 
imports fivefold. We are unanimously ready to wade to it 
through blood." He closed his fierce prophecy with a sugges- 
tion that the Mississippi would be no sooner cleared than the 
Spanish mines beyond it " might be possessed with the greatest 
facility." With these views he entered the convention, but itss 
members resisted his violent urgency, and deferred to another 
convention the final settlement of the question. 



THE HOLSTON PEOPLE. 341 

When this healthy and moderate action was known at the 
east, Madison recognized in gratification that " the first in- 
stance of the dismemberment of a State had been conducted 
in a way to form a sahxtary precedent." Washington stood less 
for their order of going, and was prepared to meet the people 
of Kentucky " upon their own ground, and draw the best line 
and make the best terms, and part good friends." 

To turn to the people of the Ilolston. They proved to have 
shared only a temporary calm after their convention had dis- 
solved. Sevier had been unable to uproot the latent passion for 
indeiiendence. Early in the year (1785), the Separatist leaders 
had petitioned Congress for the right of setting up their new 
State between the Alleghany liiver and the meridian of Louis- 
ville. Its northern bounds were to run from the junction of 
the Great Kanawha and Greenbrier and along the 37° parallel. 
Its southern were to be by the 34°. This would have given them 
a large part of Kentucky, and have carried their territory well 
down to the bend of the Tennessee. With these rather mag- 
nificent visions, their Assembly met at Greenville, now selected 
as a capital, and in March began their work, in a rude log 
cabin, which had an earth floor and a clapboard roof. This 
hasty body stood for a population which it was supposed num- 
bered about five-and-twenty thousand. But it was a community 
with no other currency than that supplied by fox and mink 
skins, varied with such agricultural products as could be passed 
from hand to hand. With this money they proposed to pay 
their civil servants, and, upon an apportioned salary of siich 
products, Sevier, now in the headlong stream like everybody 
else, was chosen governor. Their new chief magistrate very soon 
sent a letter to Congress asking for recognition, but it was 
unheeded,- as Governor Martin had warned them it would be. 
Patrick Henry, alarmed at their territorial ambition, feared 
that it would arouse the tribes and cause impediments in the 
Spanish negotiations. Meanwhile, as governor, he cautioned 
the State's Indian agent not to commit Virginia to any partici- 
pation in coming events. 

In May, Congress urged North Cai'olina to renew her cession 
and thus place the territory of the Separatists under federal 
control ; but a state pride declined to part with any portion of 



342 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

her territory with a rebellion unquelled. On the last of May, 
Sevier's people made a covenant with such of the Cherokees 
as coukl be enticed, and got a questionable title to lands south 
of the French Broad, and east of the ridge which parted the 
waters of the Tennessee River. They invaded without any such 
pretended right other lands of the Cherokees and Creeks. 
Such acts added an Indian war to their other difficulties. 

Against all these usurped functions Governor Martin issued 
a manifesto ; and in June Sevier replied, taking the ground 
that the Separatist movement had followed upon their being- 
cast off from the parent State by the act of cession, and no 
revocation of that cession could undo their action. 

In September, 1785, Benjamin Franklin, sharing now with 
Washington the highest veneration of their countrymen, had 
landed in Philadelphia on his return from his long and distin- 
guished service in Europe. He soon received a letter which 
Sevier had written to him in July, in which the Separatist gov- 
ernor communicated the purpose of the Holston communities 
to perpetuate Franklin's signal name as that of their new com- 
monwealth, and asked his counsel and support. Sevier at much 
the same time had written a proj^itiatory letter to the Vir- 
ginia authorities ; but in neither case did the new magistrate 
elicit what he wanted. Indeed, the struggling and unkempt 
little republic was to find few fi-iends outside its own limits. 
In October, 1785, Massachusetts had moved in Congress and 
Virginia had favored a motion that Congress would support 
any State against a secession of a part of it ; but the members 
were not quite prepared to act. Patrick Henry was at the same 
time warning the Virginia delegates of the dangerous proximity 
of this rebellious State. If Congress hesitated, the Virginia 
Assembly promptly made it high treason for any attempt to 
dismember her territory in such a revolutionary way, and au- 
thorized the governor to employ the military power of the 
State in suppressing any such movement. 

While the future of the south frontiers was luicertain through 
all these movements, Congress made an effort to act in a na- 
tional capacity and soothe the irritated tribes. In the preceding- 
March, that body had authorized the appointment of commis- 
sioners to treat with the Indians. As the sunnner wore on, 



GREENVILLE CONVENTION. 343 

rumors of war were frequent, and in September, Colonel Mar- 
tin, now living on the Holston, as the Indian agent of Vir- 
ginia, had informed Patrick Henry that the southern Indians 
were preparing, in conjunction with the Wabash tribes at the 
north, to raid the frontiers. There was need of prompt action, 
and in October the commissioners sought to open negotiations 
with the Creeks at Galphinton, but those wary savages kept 
aloof. In the latter part of November, 1785, they succeeded 
better with the Cherokees, and met nearly a thousand of them at 
Hopewell on the Keowee (November 18-28). It was a principle 
with these national agents to act as if no private or state 
agreements had already been made with the tribes. It was not 
unexpected, therefore, that both North Carolina and Georgia 
complained that lands which they had reserved as bounties for 
their soldiers, in the late war, were recklessly acknowledged to 
belong to the Cherokees. The Indians showed by a map that 
the territory which they had not parted with covered more or 
less of Kentucky, Tennessee, the Caroliuas, and Georgia. It 
included both tlie Henderson purchase and the lands of the 
Cumberland, communities, but they were not disposed to dis- 
place their occupants. The line, as agreed upon, was to run from 
the mouth of Duck River (where it joins the Tennessee) to the 
ridge separating the Cumberland and Tennessee valleys, and on 
leaving this water-parting it was to strike the Cumberland, forty 
miles above Nashville. The whites within the Indian territory 
Avere to have six months to remove ; but those who were living 
— some three thousand in number — between the French 
Broad and the Holston were to remain till their case could be 
adjudicated by Congress. The treaty included a formal ac- 
knowledgment of the supremacy of the United States, and made 
it obligatory upon the Indians to give prompt notice of any 
intended hostilities of the Spaniards. 

These were the conditions when, late in 1785, a new conven- 
tion met at Greenville to adopt a permanent constitution for 
the new State. One Samuel Houston drafted tlie document 
which was first considered. It gave the name of Frankland to 
the State, and was in various ways too ideal for a practical 
people. It has only very recently been brought entire to the 
attention of scholars. It called for a single legislative chamber, 
made land-owning necessary to office-holding, but even this 



344 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

qualification must be unaccompanied by membership in the 
professions of law, medicine, and theology, while an adhesion 
to Presbyterian forms of church government was required. A 
small majority settled the question both of rejecting this consti- 
tution and substituting substantially the existing one of North 
Carolina. The final vote displaced the name of Frankland and 
adopted that of Franklin. 

And so the year 1785 closed with no improvement in the 
affairs of the western country. 

The year 1786 was perhaps the most hopeless of the long- 
collapse which followed upon the peace, — hopeless not so 
much from accumulating misfortunes, as from an aimless un- 
certainty. The affairs of the several States were more critical, 
or were thought to be more critical, than the condition of the 
whole confederacy. So each commonwealth demanded at home 
the services of its best men, and sent its less serviceable citi- 
zens to Congress. The business of that body lagged through 
the lack of assiduity in its members. A scant attendance either 
blocked work entirely, or, on the spur of an unlooked-for 
quorum, impulse rather than wisdom directed their counsels. 
Throughout the States the paper money problem disquieted 
trade, and the famous case of Trevett against Weedon in 
Rhode Island showed how the courts stood out against the 
populace. The Shays rebellion in Massachusetts had shown 
that the rottenness of the core could break out on the surface, 
while the promptness of Governor Bowdoin and General Lin- 
coln in suppressing the insurrection gave some encouragement 
that the old spirit which had won independence still lingered. 

Washington summed up the general apprehension when he 
said, " That experience has taught us that men will not adopt 
and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their 
own good, without the intervention of a coercive power." No 
such power existed. The treaty of Hopewell, on which the 
federal authority had staked its reputation for ability to deal 
\vith the Indians, was proving an empty act, and the later treaty 
wliich the same commissioner had made with the Choctaws and 
Chickasaws in January, 1786, was only less empty because it 
concerned bounds more remote from the whites : nevertheless, 
its provisions were not beyond the observation of Robertson and 



CLARK AND LOGAN. 345 

the Cumberland people, who resented what they deemed federal 
interference with their rights. AVhen Congress ratified both 
treaties in April, it had little effect but to make the federal 
purpose seem more impotent than before. 

This antagonism of the central authority and the frontiers- 
men was naturally the occasion of a savage unrest, and as the 
spring opened, the exposed settlements were in great alarm. On 
the north, the tribes of the Wabash were giving way to a long- 
harbored enmity. The Shawnees, at a conference on the Miami, 
had but grudgingly acknowledged the new Republic, while their 
promises of peace lasted no longer than there was white man's 
rum to drink. So the western settlements were beset on all sides. 
Patrick Henry sent the appeal of Virginia to Congress for help, 
and in July its secretary informed him that two companies of 
infantry had been sent to the falls of the Ohio to cooperate 
with the militia. Henry urged upon the Virginia delegates in 
Congress that the only way to prevent " loss and disgrace " was 
to rush upon the hostile towns. The result of a spasm of energy 
on the part of some Kentucky colonels was that in the face of 
the political turmoils which the settlements were experiencing, 
as we shall see, a thousand men gathered at the rapids of the 
Ohio, and were organized by George Rogers Clark for a dash 
upon the Wabash towns. The expedition, which was made in 
the autumn of 1786, proved a failure. Clark, now but a shadow 
of his former self, could not control his men, and with an ex- 
hausted commissariat, and having accomplished nothing in pro- 
portion to the outlay which had been incurred, he turned back 
with a disordered rabble. His disgrace was in some measure 
offset when Colonel Logan, with five hundred mounted rifle- 
men, by way of diverting the savages from retaliatory move- 
ments, slipped hastily among them and disconcerted them by 
the rapidity of his havoc. This and a dash of Sevier at the 
south, later to be mentioned, were the only relief of a pitiful 
season of Indian war. During it all, the federal government, 
by the aid it gave here and elsewhere, met drafts on its treas- 
ury for five times the amount which its Indian department had 
required in any previous year since the Revolutionary A^'ar had 
closed. In the autumn, Congress made a new effort to control 
the Indian affairs, when, on November 29, Dr. James White 
was made its ajjent for the southern tribes. Virginia at once 



346 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

yielded to the federal action by withdrawing her own agent, 
General Martin, though this officer was still retained by North 
Carolina in his old service. 

Amid this bustle of savage war, which was beating the fron- 
tiers on all sides, the communities of the Tennessee, Cumber- 
land, and Kentucky were still struggling with their political 
problems, and Congress was warming in debate over the ques- 
tion of the Mississippi. 

Let us turn first to the latter anxiety. Miro, in his capital 
of New Orleans, now a motley town of some five thousand souls, 
in which the French masses were far from being content under 
their Spanish masters, was pursuing a policy of trade that 
stretched far out into the American territory, as the peace of 
1783 had defined it. As director of this trade, Miro had a 
divided purpose. He felt that he must not gather too large 
gains by imposing upon the tribes prices which the Americans 
could cut down, for he well understood how the Indians could 
be led to hostile alliances by reason of better bargains. 

Miro's organization of this trade was a successful one. He 
carried on a considerable part of it up the Mississippi, beyond 
the Arkansas to the Illinois, and here, among the Sacs, his fac- 
tors contended in rivalry with the Canadians coming down from 
Mackinac. From Mobile, now an active little settlement of 
some seven hundred and fifty people, he sent some sixty thou- 
sand dollars' worth of goods north to the Choctaws and Chieka- 
saws. From Pensacola he distributed about forty thousand dol- 
lars' worth of goods among the Creeks and Cherokees ; but Miro 
found it good policy to relinquish to McGillivray some share 
of the profits, while allowing that chief a pension of six hundred 
dollars beside. From all these channels, it was calculated that 
the Spaniards reaped a profit of about a quarter of the outlay. 

This trade up the Mississippi necessarily brought the Span- 
ish agents into contact with the adventurous Kentuckians who 
dared to traffic down its current, and it could only be a ques- 
tion of time before some violent rencontre would take place. 
Natchez, at this time, was a place of some fifteen hundred inhab- 
itants. It lay within the bounds claimed by the Americans, but 
was still occupied by Spain. This possession was a standing 
challenge to the unruly frontiersmen, and even on the seaboard 



k 



JAY AND GARDOQUL 347 

an expedition would have been formed to capture it, could a 
certain swaggerer, John Sullivan by name, have commanded the 
folio wino- which his ambition coveted. 

There were still some lingering English in Natchez who had 
been engaged in trade there, when Miro, in June, 1786, warned 
them of the necessity of leaving or becoming Spanish subjects. 
In this he was acting under orders from Madrid, by which he was 
told to allow them an interval to close up their affairs. Just 
about the same time, an Ohio flatboat, laden with flour and 
kickshaws, floated to the landing. Spanish officers seized the 
vessel and confiscated the cargo. The owner was allowed to 
journey homeward, and as he went he told, with such embellish- 
ment as his injured sense suggested, the story of this Spanish 
outrage. The ^news, spreading like wildfire, reached Clark at 
Vincennes, while on the expedition which he made so ruin- 
ous ; and here, in retaliation and to appease the cupidity of his 
men, he seized the stock of a Spanish trader in the town. The 
news of Clark's indiscretion reached Wilkinson in December, 
while he and his adherents were waiting at Danville for the 
convention to gather, to which reference will be later made. 
Wilkinson, already in correspondence with Miro, and looking 
forward to a complicity in trade with the Spanish governor, 
seized the restless interval to fi*ame a remonstrance against 
Clark's act, and signing it with others, it was dispatched to 
Williamsburg, accompanied by affidavit affirming the unfit- 
ness of Clark for command, arising from habits of drink. The 
memorial pointed out the danger that such lawless conduct 
would create, and how the fortunes of the west were put in 
jeopardy. These representations had, in due time, their effect. 

Meanwhile Jay, struggling with Gardoqui, had been embar- 
rassed by the positive position which Congress had taken as to 
the occlusion of the Mississi])pi in its vote of June 3, 1784. So 
in May, 1786, Jay had asked Congress to appoint a committee 
to counsel with him ; and on this committee, indicating the pre- 
dominating views of Congress, were Rufus King and Colonel 
Pettit of Pennsylvania, who shared Jay's opinions, while Mon- 
roe, sure to be outvoted, was made a third member, and repre- 
sented the southern interests. With the backing of a majority 
of his advisers, Jaj^ on August 3, reported to Congress a })lan 



348 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

involving the closing of the Great River for a term of years, as 
a price for commercial advantages. The scheme immediately- 
aroused the indignant opjiosition of the southern members. 
Grayson of Virginia protested. Madison wrote in heat to Jeffer- 
son, and wondered if New England would sacrifice her fisheries 
for the tobacco trade. Monroe fancied he saw in the opposition 
of New York a purpose to profit by the closing of the river 
so as to gain time to develop western communications by the 
Hudson. Washington, however, still adhered to his dilatory 
jDolicy. The debates in Congress which followed showed that it 
was a contest between the North and South, with the Middle 
States in the balance. Jay carried seven States, and there were 
five against him. The Articles of Confederation required nine 
States to decide such questions, and with a clear majority of 
two for rescinding the vote of June 3, 1784, it became a ques- 
tion whether the articles or a majority should control. If 
pressed to an issue, it might cause serious danger to the confed- 
eration itself. Monroe wrote to Patrick Henry on August 12 
that the majority, if they could not force the minority to con- 
cede their point, intended to dismember the Union and set up 
an eastern confederacy. He was furthermore moved to suggest 
that the South should use force to prevent Pennsylvania going 
with the North. Madison was more moderate, and trusted to time 
to convince the Eastern States that, as carriers of the country, 
the Mississippi was really of paramount importance to them. 
The year (1786) closed in a ferment. The North was told that 
it understood the South and the West no better than England 
understood the seaboard when she brought on the Revolution, 
and that the West had no intention of cultivating its soil for 
the benefit of Spain. The West claimed that it could put twenty 
tliousand troops in the field to protect its interest, and that it 
could recruit this force from two to four thousand yearly. 

If not united on the Mississippi qxiestion. Congress had no 
divisions on maintaining the bounds which Great Britain had 
conceded in the treaty of 1783, and on August 30 Jay was 
instructed to stand by its provisions. A few weeks later, when 
the incident at Natchez became known, and Clark's retaliatory 
act was reported, feelings ran so high that Jay and his friends 
did not think it prudent to be too urgent. Madison and those 



I 



VIRGINIA AND KENTUCKY. 349 

working ior a convention to reform the government had be- 
come conscious that the Mississippi question was creating a 
sentiment antagonistic to any movement to reinforce a central 
government. He accordingly brought the question before the 
Virginia Assembl}'', and late in November that body gave an 
unequivocal expression of its views in opposition. It was ap- 
parent now, as the winter came on, that a hasty step on the part 
of Jay and his friends must produce irretrievable disaster, not 
only on the seaboard but through the west, where the proceed- 
ings of Congress had been narrowly watched. 

To go back a little. In January, 1786, Virginia had agreed 
to an act of separation from Kentucky, if the act should be 
accepted by a convention to be held in September. She also 
made it a condition that Congress should admit the new State 
to the Union after September, 1787. When this action became 
known in Kentucky, it is probable that among the body of the 
people there was a general assent to its provisions. Not so, 
however, with some ambitious designers who had already begun 
to look to the advantages of Spanish trade ; and as the election 
of delegates approached, it became evident that measures would 
be set on foot, intended to move the community beyond a mere 
acquiescence in the conditions of the parent State. The occur- 
rence at Natchez and the debates in Congress were opportune 
aids to such schemers. Wilkinson entered upon the stage to 
remove what he called the ignorance of the people. " They 
shall be informed," he said, " or I will wear out all the stirrups 
at every station." The chief contest was to come in the district 
where Wilkinson was the candidate of the absolute Separatists. 
He was opposed in the canvass by Humphrey Marshall, and 
took vmfair means for victory, as Wilkinson's opponents said. 
The revolutionists carried the election " two hundred and forty 
ahead," as he wrote. " I spoke three and a half hours. I pleased 
myself and everybody else except my dead opponents." As 
the time for the convention approached, Wilkinson wrote (Au- 
gust 18) to a friend : " Our convention will send an agent to 
Congress in November to solicit our admission into the confed- 
eracy, and to employ the ablest counsel in the State to advocate 
our cause. I could be this man, with £1,000 for the trip, if I 
could take it." He was thus quite ready to anticipate the date 



350 THE SOUTHWEST INSECURE. 

which the Virginia Assembly had prescribed, but was not yet 
prepared for that complete independence which he was yet to 
advocate, after his interview with Miro the following year. 
Mere commercial success seemed now his ardent hope, and he 
was buying tobacco in large quantities. " I look forward to 
independence," he said, with villainous glee, " and the highest 
reputation in this western world." 

When the conventiou met in September, it was apparent that 
the draft upon its meriibers, which the expeditions of Clark and 
Logan had made, was going to prevent a quorum for some time 
at least. The convention thus failing of an organization, Wil- 
kinson and his friends found time to draw up a representation 
in censure of Clark's acts at Vincennes, which was dispatched 
to the Virginia Assembly. So the year (1786) passed out in 
this respect in comparative inaction. 

Now, to glance at the Franklin communities. They were 
growing more and more distraught. The anti-Separatists had 
set up a magistracy representative of North Carolina, and the 
two factions brawled at each other. Every attempt at a con- 
ference was met by an unbending adhesion to their respective 
principles. To darken the sky still more, some reckless hordes 
of Cherokees and Chickasaws hovered about the exposed sta- 
tions, and bid defiance to any restraint of their head men, who, 
on the first of August, had made a new concession to the whites 
in granting other lands between the Blue Ridge and the naviga- 
ble rivers. Things finally got to such a pass with the maraud- 
ers that Sevier mustered a band of one hundred and sixty 
horsemen, and made a dash which scattered their forces. 

So, a third year (1786) of the uneasy peace closed beyond 
the mountains with little chance of confirmed tranquillity. An 
attempt had been made in July to control more effectually 
public sentiment by the starting of a newspaper. The JPitts- 
hvrg Gazette, at the forks of the Ohio ; and to strengthen the 
bonds of union with the parent State, the settlers had opened a 
road from Louisville to Charleston on the Kanawha. But in 
December, some disaffected spirits prepared and circulated a 
manifesto, that " Great Britain stands ready with open arms to 
receive and support us." It was a sign that the coming year 
was to have new developments. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

1787-1789. 

Six years had passed since the colonies had become a recog- 
nized Republic. It was daily becoming a more and more serious 
question if the country could disentangle itself from the diffi- 
cidties which environed it. There were divided counsels amons; 
those who had done the most to achieve its independence. Pat- 
rick Henry still believed in the confederation, for the good it 
had done, and thought the South in discarding its articles would 
lose a safeguard. George Mason w^as suspicious of the grow- 
ing power of the North. Under such champions as these, Vir- 
ginia was likely to unite as one body and lead a compacted 
South, if the question of the Mississippi was jjushed much 
farther by the commercial North, Madison and Washington 
represented more moderate sentiments, — the one felt that a 
stronger union must be attained at some risks of southern 
rights ; the other had little sympathy with the feverish resent- 
ment of Patrick Henry. Jefferson was sure that the West, 
while it had such a dominion in view as the navigation of the 
Mississippi would secure, could not be held back by the North. 

Tlie vast bulk of the American people lay within two hundred 
and fifty miles of the Atlantic coast, — possibly four millions 
in all. Beyond the mountains, and excited over this question 
of Spanish arrogance, lay but a small fraction of this po]nilation. 
This relatively scant body of people was almost entirely south 
of the Ohio, for the region to the north could hardly be called 
settled as yet, though the French along the Illinois and AVabash 
were mixed with a small proportion of English and Scotch. 
Living beyond the Mississippi, and mainly towards its mouth, 
and in the adjacent Floridas, were perhaps thirty or forty thou- 
sand French and Spaniards, not , without jealousies of each 
other, and by no means confident of maintaining a successful 



352 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

front against the banded rifles of the Kentucky and the Ten- 
nessee. 

Miro and Gardoqui, each aiming at the same result, but 
hardly less jealous of each other than the discordant parties of 
Louisiana, knew very well that there were two important fac- 
tors in this problem of the west, viewed from the Spanish side. 
One was the active loyalty of McGillivray and the sympathy 
of the southern tribes, whose adherence must be secured by 
gifts and favoring traffic. It was not long before the Chicka- 
saws disclosed to General Martin, the Indian agent of Caro- 
lina, that Spanish emissaries were intriguing for their trade. 

The other factor was the disaffection of the western people 
towards the federal union, which Navarro, the Spanish intend- 
ant, was trying to make the most of by holding out lures for 
migration to the Spanish territory. The policy of Miro and 
the intendant was hardly more compatible than those of the 
governor and Gardoqui. It was the hope of Navarro to show 
a bold front towards the American frontiersmen ; Miro believed 
in seducing them by the relaxation of commercial requirements 
at New Orleans. 

The Mississippi question had become, in the western mind, 
inextricably mixed with the danger which it was thought a 
stronger government, the likely outgrowth of the proposed fed- 
eral convention, would impose on the south. The substitution 
of a majority rule, a probable result of such a change of gov- 
ernment, for a two-thirds' rule, now their protection in all ques- 
tions like that between the new Republic and Spain, could but 
portend the downfall of their southern influence. The part of 
the west nearest the seaboard, and likely to maintain by water- 
ways an intercourse with the coast, as was the case with what 
is now West Virginia, was little affected by the pressing exi- 
gency of the Mississippi question. But as one went farther 
beyond the Kanawha, indifference gave place to excited feeling 
when the Spanish demands were mentioned. This was distinctly 
seen a year or two later, when the proposed Federal Constitution 
was under debate. While ninety-seven per cent, of the nearer 
west was pledged to the support of that instrument, ninety per 
cent, of the Kentucky settlements were as strongly adverse. 
Yet even in the most settled parts of Kentucky, commercial rea- 
sons, as they did in the tide-water districts, stood for adhesion, 



DANVILLE CONVENTION. 353 

and the two votes which Kentucky gave for the constitution in 
the Virginia convention came from Jefferson County, the best 
compacted of the settlements. 

With all this western discontent, the people were very far from 
unanimity on any remedial plan. Some were strenuous for forc- 
ing Congress to legislate in their interests. Others strove for 
absolute independence, with or without the alliance of Spain. 
Still others looked to union with Louisiana, whether that province 
remained Spanish or French. The most audacious spirits talked 
of attacking New Orleans, and wresting Louisiana from Spain 
to use it as a counter influence against northern overbearing. 
It was a diflicult task to reconcile all these opposing views. 
There was one man who thought that he could mesh all in his 
own net, and he was the vain, smooth, and dashing Wilkinson. 

The convention at Danville, in which he expected to be a 
j^ower, and which for want of a quorum had failed of an organ- 
ization, finally got to work in January, 1787. This delay had 
disarranged the plan which Virginia in her enabling act had 
set, and opened the way for revolutionary measures ; but the 
members proved temperate despite Wilkinson's adverse persua- 
sions, and simply voted to ask Virginia to rearrange her dates, 
while Kentucky waited in patience. This sober negation was 
a signal triumph of good temper, for there can be little doubt 
that the new-fledged political club of Danville, a gathering of 
representative spirits, had reflected the current aspiration when, 
at a meeting on January 6, 1787, they had voted that immediate 
separation from Virginia wovild tend to the benefit of Ken- 
tucky. Whether from ignorance or for mischief, there had 
come rumors that Jay's measvire of closing the Mississippi had 
become a law, and to spread this untn;th a circular was given out 
in some quarters in March, which also kept concealed the really 
strenuous efforts made by the parent State to promote the west- 
ern interests. All such forced manoeuvres were but a part of 
the policy of the Wilkinson faction to coerce public opinion. To 
increase the disquiet, Gardoqui was at the same time making 
incautious advances to such western leaders of opinion as he 
could reach. Madison, in March, 1787, disclosed the evidence 
of this to Jefferson, expressing dread of the consequence of 
«uch appeals to the wild ambition of the frontiers. Nor were 
the reports which reached him of British intrigue less disquiet- 



354 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

iug, for he knew that emissaries from Canada " had been feel- 
ing the pulse of some of the western settlements." It was 
pretty certain, too, that there were those south of the Ohio who 
met them with listening ears. Meanwhile, Gardoqui had been 
in conference with the Virginia delegates, who had been charged 
to deliver to him the not uncertain opinions of their Assembly, 
— demands which we have seen Wilkinson found it convenient 
to ignore. The minister and his interlocutors had indulged to 
their liking in menace and expostulation, but to little effect. 

By March, 1787, these incidents and alarming reports from 
the west had brought Jay's project to at least a temporary 
stand. Madison did not view with unconcern the trail which 
the debates in Congress on the Mississippi question had laid on 
the southern consciousness. " Mr. Henry's disgust exceeds all 
measure," he wrote to Jefferson, and at times it seemed as if 
the movement towards a federal convention, which he had so 
much at heart, had received an irrevocable setback. 

On April 11, 1787, Jay finally reported to Congress the draft 
of an agreement with Gardoqui for the closing of the Mis- 
sissippi, as an accompaniment of a commercial treaty with 
Spain. It was at once apparent that Congress had lost nnich 
of its sympathy for the j^roject, and after an acrimonious debate 
on the 23d, in which the Northern States were charged with 
trying to protect their vacant lands against the competition of 
the west, the rival feelings began to subside, and Jay soon grew 
quite of the mind to make, either by treaty or force, Spain 
yield to the inevitable. ■ 

So the burning question passed ; and for the next eighteen \ 
months we hear little of it, except as it offered a ready excuse . 
to the intriguers in their efforts to sway the western people in 
their own private interests. But for this, it would have been 
accepted as finally disposed of by Congress till at least the am- 
bitious hopes of the west could find more propitious times. The 
trials of savage warfare and the seething condition of western 
internal politics were not favorable, at present, to any decisive 
aggression on the power of Spain. 

The Franklin movement was nearing a collapse. There was 
a hope in March that Evan Shelby, rejaresenting North Caro- 
lina, might effect a compromise with Sevier, but all signs failed. 



WILKINSON AT NEW ORLEANS. 355 

It next looked as if the Chickamaugas might entrap the luck- 
less governor, and his last appeal to Benjamin Franklin had 
failed. The Holston Separatists seemed cowed, and in the nick 
of time (May 21) a firm and judicious address from Governor 
Caswell satisfied most people that the end of the ujistart com- 
monwealth had come. 

In Kentucky, the convention met in May, 1787, and the 
tricks of the intriguers were discovered when it was learned 
that there was no warrant for the circular of March. Soberer 
counsels prevailed, and the members accepted anew the trials 
of patience. 

Wilkinson, with a growing consciousness of his loss of polit- 
ical power, had turned to fostering his own pecuniary gains. 
In the preceding autumn (1786), he had visited Natchez, and 
had opened friendly relations with Gayoso, the Spanish com- 
mander. He had established them in part by an intimation 
that if Kentucky felt it necessary, she might invite England to 
descend with her the Mississippi and effect a joint occupancy of 
Louisiana and New Mexico. 

Some time in the winter, Steuben had applied to Gardoqui 
for a passport to enable a gentleman to visit New Orleans, but 
the request was refused. Steuben's friend was Wilkinson, who 
at a later day explained that, under the guise of a commer- 
cial venture, his real object was to open confidential communi- 
cations with Miro. Gardoqui's refusal did not daunt him, and 
gathering together his flour, bacon, butter, and tobacco, he had 
everything ready to send a flotilla down the river in the spring. 
In June, 1787, his barges were tied up to the banks at New 
Orleans, without an attempt of any Spanish oflicer to seize 
them. There is some mystery as to the way in which Wilkin- 
son secured this prompt exemption. It is not improbable that 
Gayoso's reports to Miro had made the Spanish governor timid, 
and that he had learned that Gardoqui, who was not accom- 
l)lishing all he wished, needed more time for further efforts 
before a rupture with the Republic was forced. If Miro hesi- 
tated at all, Wilkinson seems to have succeeded in teaching 
him that there was more profit in trade than in war. He speed- 
ily exemplified his maxim by driving such bargains wdth the 
Spanish merchants that he sold his tobacco for five hundred 



356 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

times its cost. Whether Wilkinson deceived the governor or 
betrayed his country mattered little to himself as long as he 
accomplished his object in ensnaring Miro in his commercial 
plot, through which a division of profits was to enrich both. 

The sanguine American had already entered upon ambitious 
projects in Kentucky, for which bountiful returns in trade were 
quite necessary. In October, 1786, he had bought the site of 
the future Frankfort, and had secured the passage of a bill in 
the Virginia Assembly to erect a town upon it. He was to have 
a fine house of his own there, and to make improvements suited 
to establish the new settlement as the headquarters of his busi- 
ness operations. Indeed, its situation admirably fitted the 
place to become the scene of busy labors in the construction of 
barges for the river trade. 

Gardoqui, in Philadelphia, had kept a jealous eye upon Miro's 
activity in New Orleans, and in the previous January the Span- 
ish governor had found the minister's emissaries watching his 
movements. If there was to be any sharing of profits, Gar- 
doqui was not inclined to be forgotten, and to propitiate him 
Miro had shipped a lading of three thousand barrels of flour to 
Philadelphia. 

In all this Wilkinson was shrewd, and supposed he perma- 
nently covered his tracks, as he did to his contemporaries, but 
researches at Madrid at a later day revealed his rascality. He 
is said to have filled his pockets with t|35,000 from his venture, 
and with these gains he took ship for Philadelphia. He carried 
away also a permit for further trade, which was renewed in 
1788 and 1790, with all the advantages which came from the 
power to bribe by it whoever was prompted by avarice to sell 
his independence. Before Wilkinson was ready to leave, Miro 
obtained from him an outline of what the Spanish faction pro- 
posed to do in Kentucky. In September, Miro transmitted it 
to Madrid, where it tells a damning tale to-day. The sleek 
American did not quite succeed in inspiring confidence, for 
both Miro and Navarro were themselves too much entangled in 
the plot to be conscious of rectitude ; nor was he altogether 
trustful of it in an accomplice. They accordingly in Novem- 
ber, just as Wilkinson was setting sail, and not certain of the 
turn of affairs, appealed to the home government for aid in 
fortifying the line of the Mississippi, whereby to hold back 



KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE. 357 

from the mines of Mexico " a poor, daring, and ambitious 
jjeople, like the Americans," for as such Navarro, whose phrase 
this is, not inaptly rated the people he was dealing with. 

Wilkinson, on his way home, passed through Richmond just 
after Christmas, 1787. He here heard of the outcome of the 
federal convention. The result alarmed him, a,nd he declared 
that the first Congress under the new government would pass 
Jay's measure and settle the destiny of the west. 

Before following Wilkinson over the mountains for other 
intrigues, let us glance a moment at the condition in which, on 
his return in the early months of 1788, he found Kentucky. 
The revolutionist party had, in the jireceding August, estab- 
lished at Lexington The Iventucl'y Gazette, as an organ in 
their interests. It apjDcared on a half-sheet of coarse paper, 
ten inches by nineteen, with the imprint of John Bradford, 
who two years before had come to Kentucky, a man of some six- 
and-thirty years. The press had been carried from Philadelphia 
to Pittsburg, and thence floated down the river to Limestone, 
and so transported by packhorses to Lexington. By a mishap 
on the way the type " fell into pi," as the publisher announced 
in his first issue. 

This initial number of the revolutionary organ was barely 
circulated before, on September 17, 1787, the convention of 
which so much was expected, and for which a remarkable 
patience had been exercised, came together. Its opinion was 
now unanimous for separation from Virginia, and the necessary 
vote to propitiate Congress to accept the new State was passed, 
— all being done in accordance with the requirements of the 
enabling act of Virginia. It seemed now fairly certain tliat the 
dignity of Statehood was at hand. The recent setting up, in 
July, of the northwest territory at Marietta was deemed an 
earnest of the purjjose of Congress to apportion the western 
country into States. 

Looking to a similar movement south of Kentucky, the un- 
fortunate Franklin experiment had delayed the final cession of 
the North Carolina lands. These lay still farther south, and 
stretched to the Mississippi in a strip of territory which, by 
some interpreters of the South Carolina cliarter, belonged to that 



358 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

State. Georgia, however, was thought to have at least as good 
a title to it. It was a question where the due west line began, 
and as the Savannah had different tributaries at the northwest, 
the point selected by each was to give as much territory as pos- 
sible to its own jurisdiction. South Carolina claimed to run 
the line from the junction of the Tugaloo and Keowee rivers, 
where they form the Savannah. Georgia claimed the source of 
the Keowee as the real head of the Savannah, and that the line 
should start westward at that fountain. The claims of the two 
States were before Congress in May, 1786, for adjudication, 
and the decision had not been reached when South Carolina, 
on March 8, 1787, made a cession of her rights, and on August 
9, Congress accepted it. 

The year 1787 had, from the exasperation of the Indians, 
been a restless one throughout the regions watered by the afflu- 
ents of the Gulf, as well as upon the adjacent waters which 
flowed into the Atlantic. Savannah had even been thi'eatened, 
and new defenses were planned. The Tennessee region had 
been hard pressed under the assaults of the Creeks, and Rob- 
ertson was forced to ask assistance of Kentucky and Sevier. 
Finding, as he said, that the Creeks " talked two tongues," 
he had marched in June, 1787, against the savage strongliolds 
near the Muscle Shoals, and had found among their villages 
some French traders, who had supplied them with arms, and 
he had other proofs that emissaries from the French on the 
Wabash had for two years been inciting them against the 
Cumberland people. There had been some Indians murdered 
near the Clinch River, and Governor Randolph of Virginia 
sought as best he could to stop the retaliatory countermai^ches, 
and to hold Logan and Crockett in check. Amid all this 
savagery, James White and James Conner visited the site of 
Knoxville, and located here a warrant for land which they 
had received for service in the revolutionary army. So a new 
western town was started. 

Early in 1788, Wilkinson was back among his Kentucky 
friends, nursing his secret. If not disclosed to his nearest con- 
federates to its full extent, it was to be better understood, many 
years later, when Miro's dispatch of January 8, 1788, to his 



THE CUMBERLAND PEOPLE. 359 

government was found, and it appeared how traitorously the 
wily Kentuckian had bargained away the western settlements. 
His correspondence with Miro in the spring of this year 
(1788), which was sent down the river by boat, and has also 
been preserved, shows how he attempted to augment the hopes 
of the Spanish governor by assuring him that all was well ; 
that there was no likelihood of Congress thwarting their plans ; 
and that he had succeeded in blinding Washington, " the 
future king of America," as he called him. A^'ith these assui'- 
ances, Miro had little difficulty in writing to Madrid that the 
frontier colonies were secure for Spain. 

AVell he might think so, for both from Cumberland and the 
Ilolstou, as well as from Kentucky, came the welcome tidings. 
In the Cumberland district, Robertson and McGillivray had 
indeed been running a tilt at each other. The Cumberland 
leader, supposing that Spanish intrigue had aroused the Creeks 
and the Chickamaugas, had made, as we have seen, a dash upon 
them at the Muscle Shoals. Miro had protested against Rob- 
ertson's sus})icions, and McGillivray had taken his revenge 
upon the whites. After this bloody satisfaction, that half-breed 
Creek intimated to Robertson that if he would consider the ac- 
count closed, he was quite willing to bury the hatchet. Where- 
upon reconciliation went so far that in the spring of 1788, 
McGillivray informed Miro that Robertson and the Cumber- 
land people wei"e preparing to make friends with the Creeks 
and throw themselves into the arms of Spain. This meant a 
substantial triumph of Spanish interests, for Nashville, the 
Cumberland capital, which had grown to be a settlement of 
eighty or ninety log huts gathered about a court-house, had 
become the rallying-point for some five thousand hardy pio- 
neers. These were scattered along eighty odd miles of the; 
river bank, and constituted a self-sustaining community, thrown 
upon its own resources, and separated by a trackless wilder- 
ness from the dwellers on the Kentucky. AVith the settlement 
about Jonesboro', one hundred and eighty-three miles away, 
these Cumberland ]ieople had more intercourse, but still it was 
not very close. The track lay through a dangerous country, 
in which IVIartin had had many a struggle with the irascible 
Chickamaugas ; bi;t the way was soon made safer, when the 
trail was improved, and armed patrols passed to and fro. It 



360 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

was over this trail that the North Carolina judges came at 
times, under the escort of such a guard, to administer back- 
woods justice in the court-house at Nashville. 

Passing over this route from North Carolina, young Andrew 
Jackson, now in his twenty-first year, and armed with a commis- 
sion as public prosecutor, had stoj^ped on his way at Jonesboro', 
where he found the legitimate government restored and Sevier 
a fugitive. Hard pressed in his disappointment, that luckless 
magistrate had courted the authorities of Georgia, and proposed 
to occupy a part of its territory on the great bend of the Tennes- 
see with such followers as he could make adhere to his fortunes. 
This failed. At times he thought that he could plunge into 
an Indian war, or lead an attack on the Spaniards, and in this 
way prolong his power. Then he thought he could do better 
to offer his services to Miro and Gardoqui, as he did on Sep- 
tember 12, 1788, and throw himself and his State " into the 
arms of his Spanish Majesty," just at a time when Congress, 
rising to the exigency, had determined (September 16) to insist 
at all hazards on the navigation of the Mississippi. McGillivray 
got wind of Sevier's purpose, and confirmed the Spanish author- 
ities in the hopes which Sevier raised. With all this tergiver- 
sation, Sevier had seemingly no heart to turn upon the parent 
State, and when Gardoqui sent Dr. James White to open terms 
of agreement with Sevier, the latter is said to have informed 
Shelby of the plot that Gardoqui was proposing. 

So Sevier lived on for a while in this uncertainty. At last, 
trusting to his ]:)opularity to save him, he put himself within 
reach of one Tipton, an old enemy, and in October he was 
arrested and carried before a judge. There is a story, admit- 
ting of embellishments, which goes to show that he was rescued 
under the eyes of the judge and suffered to vanish into the 
devious ways of the wilderness, and that the youthful Jackson 
stood by and witnessed the escape. This was the tale which 
Jackson told to amuse the loungers when, a short time after- 
wards, he reached Nashville; but he carried more important 
tidings when he took to the Cumberland settlers the story of 
the adoption of the new Federal Constitution, and disclosed the 
preparations which were making, when he left the seaboard, for 
the election of Washington as the first President. 

After March, 1788, Miro had been left alone in New Orleans, 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. 361 

Navarro having departed for Spain with reports. While the 
governor was still worrying over seven hundred hungry souls 
who had been burned out in New Orleans and thrown upon the 
resources of his gi-anaries, he had some satisfaction in believing 
that he had at last got into close touch with different sections 
of the American southwest. He would not have been so com- 
placent in his joy if he had known that his rival, Gardoqui, at 
about the same time, liad received orders from Madrid to play 
into Wilkinson's hands. 

The critical time for Kentucky had come in June, 1788, just, 
as Miro, at New Orleans, was receiving renewed assurances 
from Wilkinson, brought by a flotilla which that speculator had 
dispatched from Frankfort. On the 2d of that month, Congress 
had voted to make Kentucky a State of the Union, and had 
appointed a committee to draft the bill. This was no sooner 
done than, on July 2, 1788, the news of New Hampshire's 
adoption (June 21) of the constitution came. This counted 
the ninth State in the column, and made the trial of the new 
government a certainty. 

Virginia had been for some time considering whether she 
also should accede, and the question in her convention was 
turning largely upon what would be the effect on the West and 
the navigation of the Mississippi by the operation of the new 
constitution. It had long been felt that the risk was great, and 
that the acceding of Virginia was doubtful. Washington, in 
April, thought that the widespread apprehension in Kentucky 
would swing Virginia into opposition. At that time, it was 
supposed that nine of the fourteen Kentucky members of the 
Virginia convention had committed themselves against the new 
constitution. When the convention met, it proved that seven 
members instead of nine stood out, and rallied with the rest 
about Grayson and Henry. These leaders, however, proved 
unequal to force a majority of the convention to agi*ee with 
them, and on June 26, Virginia, to make a tenth State, by a 
sufficient majority in the convention, had wheeled into line 
before the news from New Hampshire had come. 

It seemed now in Congress that Virginia, having been com- 
mitted to the federal experiment, and the old Congress hav- 
ing become moribund, it was best to leave the question of 
setting up Kentucky as a State to the approaching government. 



362 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

Accordingly, on July 2, the day on which the ninth State was 
known to have been secured, the committee which had been 
appointed to grant an enabling act asked to be discharged. 

This outcome caused a sore disappointment in Kentucky. 
Public sentiment was inclined to charge the majority of Con- 
gress with jealousy of the west. It was alleged that its mem- 
bers had a direct purpose of delay till, under the new order of 
things, Vermont could be brought into the Union to offset the 
new Southern State. 

This apparently was the conviction of John Brown, one of 
the representatives in Congress from Kentucky, and in this 
frame of mind he had had an interview with Gardoqui.' This 
agent had intimated to the Kentuckian that Spain was ready to 
bargain with his constituents for the navigation of the Missis- 
sippi. Brown disclosed by letter the proposition to some friends 
in Kentucky, and probably took Madison into the secret. It is 
not certain that Gardoqui was as guarded, and in the attempt 
to vindicate Brown's loyalty, which has been made of late 
years by his grandson, it is said that the Spanish agent made 
no secret of his purpose. It seems certain that Gardoqui's 
proposition never took the form of a settled understanding. On 
the other hand, it is not known that it elicited from Brown any 
repugnance. He may have kept silence the better to draw 
Gardoqui into actions which could be used to force Congress 
to uphold vigorously Kentucky's demands of Spain and her 
requirements of Statehood. Brown had indeed already com- 
mitted himself as an advocate of the independence of Kentucky 
within the Federal Union. In April and May, Madison had per- 
suaded him that the Mississippi question stood a better chance 
of solution under the new government than under the old. 
Jefferson had told him that " the navigation of the Mississippi 
was, perhaps, the strongest trial to which the justice of the 
federal government could be put."' In July, Brown had written 
to his Kentucky friends that Spain would not give up the Mis- 
sissip]ii as long as Kentucky was a part of the United States, 
and there is small doubt of Bi'own's serious apprehensions. 
There is little question that Gardoqui, in some way, brought 
similar importunate claims to Henry Innes and George Nicho- 
las, two other influential Kentuckians. The extent to which 
these three 'friends went at Gardoqui's bidding shows them at 



1 



THE WILKINSON FACTION. 



363 



least to have been indiscreet, while it is just as certain that the 
conduct of AYilkinson and Judge Sebastian, in the way in which 
such advances were met by them, proved themselves unmistak- 
able traitors. Sebastian made a bold acknowledgment in the 
end. Wilkinson sneakingly sought ever after to cover his tracks. 
When, on July 29, the Kentucky convention met, Wilkinson 
made a show of causing Brown's suspicions of Congress to be 
disclosed ; but he did not think it prudent to reveal Brown's 
account of Gardoqui's insinuating promises. A considerable 




NEW MADRID. 
[From CoUot's Atlas.l 

part of the convention, irritated by the procrastination of Con- 
gress, was ready to follow Wilkinson and Sebastian in declaring 
for the immediate independence of Kentucky, but the majority 
was against it. The conservative stability of the Scotch-Irish 
did much to produce the result, though the efforts of the east- 
ern merchants to close the Mississippi, and the avowed purpose 
to seat the new government in New York, instead of further 
south, brought contrary influences to bear. 

The Wilkinson faction finally succeeded in getting another 
convention ordered for November, but before it met tliere were 
two new phases of the complex political condition rapidly de- 
veloping, and they need considei'ation. 



Note. —The map on the two following pages is from a " Map of the Nortliern and MiilJle 
States" in Jedediah Morse's American Geogrnphii, Elizabethtown, 1789, engraved by Amos Doo- 
little. It was repeated in the Boston, 1793, edition. 



In o q zf o 



StLiou H. -^ 




366 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

It had been an object of Spain to induce the American fron- 
tiersmen to settle on lands beyond the Mississippi. Miro had 
invited Robertson to this end. Gardoqui had sent emissaries 
to the western country to disclose a like plan. His agents found 
little willingness to accept such offers, though some adventurous 
spirits like Steuben and George Rogers Clark were ready to 
lend their influence. 

In July, 1788, Spanish troops had been sent to fortify New 
Madrid, a position on the river some distance below St. Louis. 
As a part of the scheme to strengthen the line of the Missis- 
sippi against piratical inroads of the Americans, Natchez was 
further fortified, and a fleet of patrol boats was soon placed 
on the river. 

Colonel George Morgan of New Jersey, a revolutionary soldier, 
had of late been trying to induce Congress to help him found 
a colony near Kaskaskia. This pending, Gardoqui sought him 
with an offer of conceding twelve or fifteen million acres of 
land at New Madrid. On October 3, 1788, the terms were set- 
tled. It was expected that his followers would be Protestants, 
and guarantees against religious intei-ference were made. Free 
trade down the river satisfied the commercial requirements. 
The position of New Madrid, nearly opposite the mouth of the 
Ohio, gave earnest of a large town. Morgan issued a circular 
setting forth the advantages of the plan. It promised land at 
an eighth of a dollar an acre, with aid in building dwellings. It 
set forth the richness of the country, the abundance of buffalo 
and other game, which, if furnished by contractors, would cost 
a penny the pound. Free transportation down the Ohio of all 
household effects would be given. Schoolmasters would accom- 
pany the emigrants. 

One of these circulars coming to the hands of Madison, he 
wrote to Washington (Mai'ch 26, 1789) that it contained "the 
most authentic and precise evidence of the Spanish project that 
has .come to my knowledge." He also wrote to Jefferson that 
" no doubt the project has the sanction of Gardoqui," and the 
Mississippi is "the bait for a defection of the western people." 

This movement of Gardoqui was but one of the rival meas- 
ures which estranged Miro from the Spanish agent at the seat 
of government, and neither the latter nor Wilkinson was satis- 
fied with the prospect. It was too evidently a sinister stroke at 



DORCHESTER AND KENTUCKY. 3G7 

the secret plans of the Spanish faction in Kentucky. Wilkin- 
son had just obtained (August) a renewal of his license from 
Miro, and a cargo of dry goods had been sent up the river to 
him, accompanied by the prudent advice from his confederate 
not to put too high a price upon his wares, for fear of diminishing 
among the Kentuckians the advantages of Spanish intercourse. 

The other new phase of western condition, to which reference 
has been made, on being developed in the autumn of 1788, 
was not on the side of the Mississipj^i, but on that of Canada. 
There was a faction, as has been indicated, among the Kentucky 
politicians, who looked rather to France than to Spain for the 
solution of their difficulties. It was hoped that France would 
assert her right to Louisiana, and invite the west to a share in it. 
Some such representation had been made to the French minis- 
tr}^ when it came to the notice of the English. It was through 
some one at Detroit that Lord Dorchester's attention was first 
called to the chance of making common cause with the disaffected 
west. The same informant told the Canadian governor of the 
movement then gathering head for the occupation of the Mus- 
kingum country. A hint was also given of that disloyal spirit 
which the secret service books of Sir Henry Clinton have fas- 
tened, justly or unjustly, upon a soldier of the Revolution who 
was at this time a leader in the Ohio movement. This corre- 
spondent of Dorchester adds that " a General Parsons among 
them has made advances to establish commercial interests with 
Canada." If this could happen north of the Ohio, there was a 
glimmering hope that some similar leader might be found south 
of the Ohio, to be clandestinely beckoned into toils. Very 
likely this secret informer in Detroit was a half-pay British 
officer, Colonel John Connolly, a Pennsylvanian by birth, who 
in 1775 had served the royal cause under Lord Dunmore. For 
this he had suffered a long imprisonment. He had also a dis- 
tinct personal ginevance against the Americans for the confis- 
cation of some property at the falls of the Ohio. He saw, or 
thought he saw, how it was the commercial instinct of the east, 
particularly of New England, which had started the new life on 
the Ohio, and had sent adventurous people, possessed "of a 
universal facility," to fill up "this tempting, though remote 
country." 



368 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

Connolly was such a person as Dorchester needed to probe 
the secret impulses of the settlers south of the Ohio. He left 
Detroit in October, and, proceeding by the Miami, reached Lou- 
isville in time to witness the canvass which was then going on 
among the electors of the new convention. In this he saw the 
Spanish and anti-Spanish factions striving for mastery. He 
heard much of the outspoken advocacy of Wilkinson on the 
Seimratist side. 

While Connolly thus looked on, he gave out that he was on 
the spot simply to see after his own interests in confiscated 
property. He admitted his real object cautiously, and probably 
never committed himself to mau}^ persons. Among those whom 
he approached was Colonel Thomas Marshall, who very prom2:)tly 
reminded him that if Lord Dorchester meant kindness, he had 
best first stop the raids of the Indians on the frontiers. Later, 
on November 18, 1788, or thereabouts, Connolly met Wilkin- 
son at his own house. To him he disclosed his full plans. Ten 
thousand men were to be sent from Canada down the Missis- 
sippi, while a British fleet forced the river on the Gulf side. 

Wilkinson was not more pleased with seeing his own plans 
foiled by this new scheme than he had been with Gardoqui's 
projects. Accordingly, by the aid of confederates, he caused a 
feigned personal attack to be made on Connolly, which made the 
spy apprehensive of assassination, and j^rompted him to leave 
hastily for Detroit. 

Connolly, who on reflection thought he had escaped a private 
plot, and that really half the Kentuckians were ready for his 
scheme, made a rather sanguine report to Dorchester, The 
governor's letters to Sydney show that certainly there had been 
some considerable response to his overtures. The late John 
Mason Brown, in his vindication of John Brown, brings to 
light, from the English archives, a paper of reflections from 
one of these seeming clandestine partisans. A few weeks 
after Connolly's disappearance, both Marshall and Harry Innes 
communicated to Washington what they knew of Connolly's 
doings. 

While Connolly was still in Kentucky, the convention, whose 
preliminary canvass he had been watching at Louisville, met at 
Danville on November 3. It had appeared at one time as if 



BROWN AND WILKINSON. 369 

Wilkinson wonld be rejected in his candidature, but his skillful 
dissembling saved him, while his confederates were defeated. 

The convention adopted an address to Congress, in which 
it was said : " As it is the natural right of the people of this 
country to navigate the Mississippi, so they have also a right, 
derived from treaties and national compacts," and these rights 
" we conjure you to procure." 

Brown, with an air of knowing more than he expressed, ad- 
vised the convention to wait patiently until what they wanted 
came. What he meant by this enigma is clear enough, when 
Oliver Pollock informs Miro that there is, in Brown's opinion, 
no salvation for Kentucky but in swinging over to Spain. 

A motion was made to send a temperate and respectful ad- 
dress to the Virginia Assembly, urging an act of separation. 
Wilkinson tried in vain to substitute a vote instructing the 
delegates in the Assembly ; and then read to the convention a 
memorial which he said he had left with Miro to be sent to 
Madrid. From the best evidence obtainable Wilkinson in this 
paper had unreservedly committed himself to the Spanish plot. 
In all these steps his purpose, by his own confession to Miro, 
was to foster a spirit of revolt, and to irritate Congress to some 
incautious act. When such views obtained as Governor Clin- 
ton had openly professed to Gardoqui, namely, that the peopling 
of the West from the East was a national calamity, it was not 
difficult to hope for Congress to be equally indiscreet. To 
help on such a plot, Wilkinson told Miro that he looked to 
Spain to sow other seeds of discord between the East and the 
West, and Miro sent his friend five thousand dollars to use in 
tampering with the conscience of the unyielding. 

As a blind, Wilkinson further moved to ask Congress to take 
decided action against Spain, and it was so agreed. 

Before the year closed, Wilkinson had begun to think that, 
after all, his plans might irretrievably fail. Such a mischance 
was perhaps hinted at by his confederate, Dunn, to whom St. 
Clair, now on the Ohio with a show of military authority, and 
knowing Wilkinson's iutrigues, was writing in a warning vein, 
and beggiug him to " detach Wilkinson irom the Spanish party." 
In this conjunction A¥ilkinson and his friends sent a petition 
to Gard<.qui for a grant of land on the Yazoo and the Missis- 
sippi ; and writing to Miro about it, he informed him that his 



370 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

purpose was merely to secure a place of refuge for himself and 
his adherents, in case it should become necessary to have one. 

This measure off his mind, Wilkinson made haste to show 
Gardoqui how important a factor he might become in thwarting 
British intrigue, by informing that Spanish agent (January 1, 
1789) that the emissaries from Detroit were still active in the 
west. Just at the same time, Robertson, thinking to propitiate 
Miro by naming a district on the Cumberland after him, wrote 
(January 11, 1789), as did later General Robert Smith (March 
4), that the time was approaching for the Cumberland peojjle 
to join with Spain. Wilkinson almost simultaneously was dis- 
patching a new flotilla of twenty flatboats to continue his com- 
mercial connection with New Orleans. So it seemed to the 
Spanish intriguers north and south that there were to be renewed 
efforts in behalf of Spain, before her American confederates 
slunk away to the Yazoo. 

The inauguration of the new government at New York, set 
for March, was not far distant, and time would, therefore, before 
long show what its effect was to be on Wilkinson's purposes. 
Washington, with the interval rapidly shortening before great 
responsibilities woidd devolve upon him, and fully informed of 
what was doing in the west, caused a warning to be inserted in 
the Alexandria Gazette that this Spanish intrigue " was preg- 
nant with much mischief." Later, in March, 1789, not long- 
before he was to be inaugurated, he wrote to Innes : " I have 
little doubt but that a perseverance in temperate measures will 
produce a national policy mutually advantageous to all parts of 
the American Republic." It was significant of a steady hand 
ready to grasp the helm. 

From a letter addressed by Wilkinson to Miro, on February 
12, 1789, we learn just how the situation seemed to that conspir- 
ator, or rather how he chose to make it seem to his confederate. 
He assured him that the leading men in Kentucky, with the 
exception of Colonels Marshall and Muter, were committed to 
" the important objects to which we aim ; " and that some delay 
was inevitable till the new government had assembled and de- 
clared itself, and that if it would be in the way of resentment, 
the securing of the Yazoo grant might prove timely. Mean- 
while, he trusted that Spain would not relax her efforts to sow 
dissension in the west. He recounted the circumstances of Con- 



WILKINSON AND McGILLIVRAY. 371 

nolly's mission and of his ignominious flight. He said there is 
a current rumor that England is trying to restore Gibraltar to 
Spain at the price of New Orleans and the Floridas. 

Two days later (February 14, 1789), Wilkinson dispatched 
a second letter. In this he regrets that Gardoqui, instead of 
Miro, had been given the power to treat with Kentucky, and 
hopes that the Yazoo country will enable him and Miro to defeat 
the plans of Gardoqui and Morgan at New Madrid. Miro, as 
it appears from a remonstrance which he sent on May 20 to 
Madrid, did not conceal his fears that Gardoqui had been over- 
reached by Morgan, and that the true object of the American 
was to plant a new American State west of the Mississippi. 
With this apprehension, Miro later (July) ordered the com- 
mandant at New Madrid to strengthen his defenses, while he 
did ostensibly what he could for the comfort of the new colony. 

There might well be ground for fear on Miro's part that with 
all his magnificent vision of an extended Spanish dominion, he 
was himself, as he deemed Gardoqui to be, dealing with traitors, 
who at any moment might turn upon him. His position was 
certainly a trying one. Sent to govern a province, his govern- 
ment had dispatched a covert enemy, with jjowers that war- 
ranted him to invade this province and set up other jurisdictions. 
Amid all this perplexity came in May the news of the death of 
the Spanish king and the accession of Charles IV., and he knew 
not what change of policy. 

The Mississippi, although coveted, was in fact the weak side 
of Louisiana, for it opened a path to her enemies, both up and 
down its course. The river once passed and in control, the 
mines of New Mexico were within the invaders' grasp. New 
Orleans, with its five thousand people, sheltering a disaffected 
French preponderance, was a prize for any daring commander. 
The forty-two thousand inhabitants of Louisiana had little better 
cohesion to make a defensive front. 

It had been, if it was not now, clear to Miro's mind that the 
two main supports of his ho})es were Wilkinson and oSIcGilli- 
vray, — the one to seduce the west, the other, sui)posed to hold 
moi-e or less control over the seventy thousand Indians of the 
southwest, to make them serve as a l)arrier to Spanish territory. 

To add to Miro's perplexities, he had become, through the 
communications of Wilkinson and Pollock, aware of the rival 



372 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

intrigues o£ France and England. France had given up Lou- 
isiana to Spain because she had failed to secure the returns she 
wished from its trade and mines. Since then, the American 
subduers of the wilderness had shown her that the true wealth 
of the Great Valley was not in its deposits or in its furs, but 
in its agricultural products. This development was relied upon 
to arouse French cupidity. It was said that not an aci^e had 
been cleared about Natchez but by Americans, who were now 
supplying the markets of New Orleans from their farms, — now 
reported, with probable exaggeration, by one observer as three 
thousand in number, averaging four hundred acres each. Pro- 
ductiveness like this made something more of the country than 
a bulwark of the New Mexican mines. The French nuist re- 
member, it was set forth, that by gaining the west, they would 
gain supremacy in the market for flax, hemp, and wool, and 
could drive all tobaccos out of the trade by their own. There 
were thirty thousand old subjects of France, they were reminded, 
who stood ready to welcome them in place of their Spanish 
masters. Beside these, they could depend on the sympathy and 
aid of the French on the Wabash and in Canada, and open an 
asylum to the disaffected, who were already flying from the 
French shores before the seething agitations of the Revolution. 

In aid of this French scheme, some interested persons in Ken- 
tucky had transmitted to the French representative in New 
York a memoir upon the condition of the western country, calcu- 
lated to affect the Gallic imagination. Fortunately, it did not 
bring the direful effects which Barlow's promises had produced 
on the Ohio. Indeed, Kentucky at this time had nuich more to 
offer to immigrants than the territory north of the Ohio. The 
migration of settlers was so rapid and so large that it is diffi- 
cult to reach a conservative estimate of it. The Ohio and the 
road from Limestone and the Wilderness Road were crowded 
with the trains of pioneers. During the twelve months divided 
between 1788 and 1789, to take no account of the overland 
movements, twenty thousand persons had passed down the Ohio, 
past Fort Harmar, in eight or nine hundred boats. With them 
were counted seven thousand horses, three thousand cows, nine 
hundred sheep, and six hundred wagons, — and all were, with 
few exceptions, bound for the Kentucky settlements. 

There were at this time, as contrasted with tlie scant popula- 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH FACTIONS. 373 

tion north of the Ohio, not a great deal short of one hundred 
thousand souls in the settlements of Kentucky, Cumberland, 
and Watauga. What disturbed Miro most, and offered the 
greatest inducement to the French and English factions, was 
that more than twenty thousand riflemen, a large part mounted, 
were ready to belt their fringed shirts for any emergency. 
Kentucky alone, it was thought, could send ten thousand mili- 
tia to a ])oint of danger, and her mounted patrols were always 
alert in the traveled ways. 

In urging an alliance with France, its advocates claimed that 
the Alleghanies forbade for the west all communication with 
the Atlantic ; that the unity of the Kepublic " was broken by 
the mountains ; " that the success of the seaboard could not 
contribute to the prosperity of the west. " The west, in short, 
requires a protector. The first who will stretch out its arms 
to it will have the greatest acquisition that could be desired in 
the New World." 

It is not probable that this project of a French alliance, 
looming as it did at times in excitable minds, ever made much 
progress. Its real effect was to thwart and incite by turns the 
energies of both the English and the Spanish. 

The British scheme had more of reality in it ; but it also 
failed of maturity. That there were in the west supporters 
of an English connection, beyond the numbers which Connolly 
encountered, would seem to be evident from the correspondence 
of Dorchester with the home government. In one of the gov- 
ernor's dispatches (April 11, 1789) he transmitted some "des- 
ultory reflections of a gentleman of Kentucky," which, if not 
the work of Wilkinson, was in quite his manner, and would have 
emphasized that intriguer's faithlessness to Miro, had he known 
of it. The writer says that " the politics of the western country 
must speedily eventuate in an appeal to Spain or Britain." In 
transmitting this paper, Dorchester wrote that the factions in 
Kentucky that promised best looked to an alliance with Great 
Britain, for the purpose of detaching that region from the 
Union and capturing New Orleans. The people urge, said 
Dorchester in effect, that Spain had helped the United States 
against England, and that there was now the chance to pay 
them off. Still, they wanted no active assistance till New 
Orleans was captured. Plaving thus put the case, Dorchester 



374 THE SPANISH QUESTION. 

asked the ministry how far he could safely go in responding- to 
such ajDpeals. 

In this, as in other problems, the newly installed federal gov- 
ernment was likely to prove an antagonist to deal with, different 
from the defunct confederation. Grenville seems to have sus- 
pected this, and cautioned Dorchester against active interference. 
Wilkinson was well aware of the changed conditions, and on 
September 17, 1789, he wrote to Miro, in a pitiable and self- 
convicting spirit : " I have voluntaril}' alienated myself from the 
United States, and am not yet accepted by Spain. I have re- 
jected the proffered honors and rewards of Great Britain, while 
declining the preeminence which courted my acceptance in the 
United States. I have given my time, my property, and every 
exertion of my faculties to promote the interests of the Spanish 
monarchy. By this conduct I have hazarded the indignation of 
the American Union." 

While this despondency was growing ui^on him, Wilkinson 
had failed of an election to the convention, which met on July 
20, 1789. Without his leadership the Separatist faction hardly 
dared assert itself. The new proposition of Virginia which 
came before the convention had some objectionable provisions 
as to the public lands, and it was found necessary to take fur- 
ther time to settle the differences. So, the convention adjourn- 
ing, Kentucky was not yet a State ; but the Sjianish question 
had lost a great deal of its importance, and was for a while 
about drojjping out of local politics. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

1790. 

When the new federal government was put in operation, 
there was one Northern and one Southern State still without 
the Union. In November, 1789, North Carolina had adopted 
the constitution. Many questions touching the western country 
south of Kentucky could not be considered till North Carolina 
had thus acted. This region rounded out the country, in con- 
ception at least, to the Mississippi, and although Rhode Island 
still remained recusant, not acceding till May, 1790, Oliver 
Wolcott might well say, because of Rhode Island's insignifi- 
cance, that the " accession of North Carolina has blasted the 
hopes of the anti-federalists." With small delay, on February 
25, 1790, through a deed signed by her senators. North Caro- 
lina ceded to the United States the region now called Tennessee, 
a territory then reckoned as extending east and west three hun- 
dred and sixty miles, and north and south over a degree and a 
half of latitude. The occupants of this territory, now some 
thirty thousand more or less, were not consulted, and the Indian 
title still covered it, except at the east, where the Franklin ex- 
periment had been tried, and towards the west, where some two 
thousand square miles surrounded Nashville as a political centre. 
Witliin the cession lay lands assured to the Chickasaws by the 
treaty of Hopewell (January 10, 1783), and others confirmed 
to the Cherokees by the treaty of November 28, 1785, which 
were still further to be increased by the treaty of I lolston, July 
2, 1791. The lands thus preserved to the tribes made about 
five million acres in the east and central regions, with about 
half as much more towards the Mississippi. In addition, North 
Carolina had ah-eady ])ledge(l considerable areas to her revolu- 
tionary soldiers, to individual grantees, and for the redemption 
of her scri]), so that the United States got little or nothing 



376 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

under the cession beyond the jurisdiction over the forty-five 
thousand square miles which constituted the territory. Indeed, 
it was thought that North Carolina in her jjrevious grants had 
exceeded the area of the country by half a million acres. 

On April 2, Congress accepted the cession, and in May, that 
body set up the ceded territory, to which was presumably 
added the narrow east and west strip already made over by 
South Carolina, as "the Territory south of the river Ohio." 
This act created a governor, and also three judges, who were to 
yield to a territorial assembly when the population could show 
a body of five thousand voters. The new government was to 
be guided by provisions similar to those of the ordinance of 
1787, except that slavery was not prohibited. William Blount, 
a North Carolinian of popular yet dignified manners, who en- 
joyed the confidence of the people, was made governor, reaching 
his post in October. The territory was divided into two mili- 
tary districts, the eastern of which was placed under Sevier, 
now made brigadier-general, and the western under Robertson, 
to whom was accorded a like rank. 

As to the country south of the new government, there was a 
conflict of claims between the United States and Georgia. The 
federal government insisted that it was . acquired from Great 
Britain by the treaty of 1782, the mother country having 
yielded thereby the title which she assumed under the procla- 
mation of 1763 in making it a part of west Florida. When 
she thus took it from that region and allowed it to the United 
States, it was her purpose, if Lord Lansdowue's confession is to 
be believed, to make discord thereby between the young Repub- 
lic and the house of Bourbon. Whether intending or not, she 
succeeded in that purpose. Georgia contended for prior rights 
to this debatable region under her charter, and she was now 
holding it, as the county of Bourbon, bounded on the south by 
the international line of 31°, and on the north by the Yazoo 
River. Georgia's pretension of acquiring the Indian title 
within this territory was adjudged to be illegal, since the right 
of preemption was reserved to the United States under the 
Federal Constitution which Georgia had accepted. She had 
refused to guarantee the title, however, to large tracts of lands 
in the Yazoo country, which she had granted, in the first in- 



GEORGIA. 



377 



J7 ir 




^4 Correct MAP of the 

CtJGOIIGIJ%. 



[From Jedediah Morse's American Gazetteer, Boston, 1797.] 



stance, to a company formed in Charleston, and known as the 
South Carolina Company, and later to other com])anios known 
as the Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia companies. These 
grants had been made in December, 1789, that to the South 
Carolina Company embracing ten million acres, that to tlie Vir- 
ginia Company eleven million four hundred thousand acres, and 
that to the Tennessee Company four million acres. She threw 
the burden of protecting the settlers upon tlie companies, and 
this opened complications with Spain, further affecting the 
question of the navigation of the Mississippi. 



378 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

Of the territory thus handed over to another military direc- 
tion, the Choctaws and Chiekasaws laid claim to parts of it, 
and throughout the whole of it, Sj)ain professed that she had 
jurisdiction. 

One Dr. James O'Fallon, a man about forty-five, and an 
adventurer, was made agent of the South Carolina Company, 
lie wrote on May 24, 1790, from Lexington to Miro, stating 
that he was prepared to treat for making this debatable country 
a province of Spain, and hinting that if their negotiations suc- 
ceeded, other western communities were prepared to take simi- 
lar steps. He said that within eighteen months he should have 
at his beck some ten thousand men, capable of bearing arms, 
and that in June he would visit New Orleans for a conference. 

Miro could not fail to see AVilkinson's hand in all this, and 
O'Fallon had indeed been in conference with that so far disap- 
pointed treason-monger, who had been watching the movement, 
as affording a new field for his intrigues. As early as Janu- 
ary, 1790, he had tried to ingratiate himself with O'Fallon 
and his associates, pleading his ability to induce the Spanish 
authorities to quiet the adverse interests of the Choctaws. In 
June, 1790, writing from Frankfort, Wilkinson notified Miro 
that O' Fallon's plans were in the Spanish interests, though the 
man himself was somewhat vain and flighty. " I am, never- 
theless," wrote Wilkinson, " inclined to put faith in him." 

O' Fallon's scheme was to organize a force in Kentucky, and, 
floating with it down the Mississippi, to take possession of the 
country, with George Rogers Clark, as rumor went, in military 
command. It was given out that the federal authorities favored 
the undertaking, and would adopt the military establishment. 
Wilkinson and Sevier, with a body of disapj^ointed Franklin 
men, were expected to follow and make the settlement. 

In this state of afl:'airs, Miro wrote to Madrid (August 10), 
describing the land of the South Carolina Company as extend- 
ing from eighteen miles above Natchez to thirty miles above 
the Yazoo, all of which, as he represented, was within the 
Spanish jurisdiction. He doubted the policy of harboring on 
Spanish territory a separate community with its own military 
m-ganization. It does not appear that he was aware that the 
company, in order to secure settlers, had given out a purpose 
to make in due time an American State of their colony, and it 



LAND COMPANIES. 379 

may well be doubted if tlie projectors had any such real inten- 
tion. Miro, who was never quite sure of Spain's maintaining 
herself on the Mississippi, had enough suspicion of the coni- 
23any's avowed aim to fear that it would become an aggressive 
enemy, unless Spain should in some way obtain control. Wil- 
kinson, with that devilish leer which he knew how to employ 
upon occasions, had intimated that the best way to secure this 
control was to make the Choctaws so harass the settlements 
that the colonists would turn to Miro for protection. In the 
same letter the governor informed, the minister at Madrid that 
he had already taken steps to act on Wilkinson's advice. 

The lands of the Virginia Company lay north of those of the 
South Carolina Company, being a stretch of a hundred and 
twenty miles along the river and running to 34° 40' north lati- 
tude, and so comprising what he calls a part of the hunting- 
ground of the Chickasaws, a tribe in the main friendly to the 
whites, l)ut not always controlling their young bucks. Still 
farther north were the lands of the Tennessee Company. All 
the companies' territories extended one hundred and twenty 
miles back from the river. To the lands of the latter com- 
pany, Miro acknowledged the Spanish claim to be less certain. 

In one way these new developments gave Miro some hope. 
He felt that Wilkinson, who had so far talked much and done 
little, might now find a better field for his intrigue. The gov- 
ernor complained of the small gain which Morgan had made 
farther \x\) the river, and charged him with preferring rather 
to enjoy his ease in New Jersey than to endure the hardships 
of the new colony. He thought further that the trade which 
AVilkinson had been suffered to develop between Kentucky and 
New Orleans had worked to embarrass the rival scheme at New 
Madrid. 

Miro told the minister that if O'Fallon's proposition was 
refused, the alternative for S})ain was to push in settlers in 
such numbers as to hold the region, and he adds that if the 
Americans oppose, he will use the Indians as Wilkinson liad 
suggested. 

There were other chances which Miro was glad to recognize, 
for the Creek half-breed, McGillivray, who we shall see had 
just been invited to New York, had written to the governor in 



880 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

May, 1790, that though he was indeed going thither to conclude 
a peace with the Americans, he had no intention of deserting 
his Si^anish friends, and was even prepared in due time to 
assist the Spaniards in attacking the South Carolina intruders. 
Miro took courage from this as lie wrote to McGillivray in 
August, 1790. 

But the movement of O'Fallon was not to come to any such 
conclusion, for a finishing blow had been dealt in New York 
just at the time when McGillivray was amusing Knox and his 
fellow negotiators. In August, 1790, Washington, who was 
kept informed of the military preparations in Kentucky, issued 
a proclamation, signifying his intention to suppress by force any 
liostile movement against the Spanish. So it was that, in the 
spring of 1791, the project was abandoned. On March 22, 
Jefferson had instructed George Nicholas to arrest O'Fallon. 
By this time Hamilton's scheme of finance had so carried up the 
national and state scrip that it could be used to better advan- 
tage than in buying Yazoo lands, and there were no securi- 
ties for the adventurers to work with ; and furthermore the 
national government was preparing to protect the Indians 
against state machinations in the disposal of the Indians' 
lands. So the companies and O'Fallon vanished from sight. 
In the following August, the agent of the South Carolina Com- 
pany, who had been placed at Walnut Hill, abandoned his 
post, and hostilities on the Mississippi were averted. 

It is now time to look after McGillivray and his treaty. The 
Spanish traders in Mobile, since the English surrendered the 
Indian traffic in 1782, had never been able to keep it up to 
tlie prosperous condition in which they received it ; but such as 
it was they found the readiest channel for it in ascending the 
Mobile and Alabama rivers, — sluggish streams that offered no 
great obstacles. By an upper affluent, the Tombigbee, they 
reached a village of the Chickasaws near its source, and thence, 
by a three-mile portage through a region ceded for trading- 
posts by the treaty of Hopewell, they could get into the basin 
of the Tennessee. Thither passed trader and warrior with 
equal ease. Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee, coming 

Note. — The opposite map, showing the country between Mobile and Pensacola and the Ten- 
nessee River, is a section of Samuel Lewis's Map of the United States, 1795. 



382 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

from different directions, liad often combined here for fatal 
forays along tlie Tennessee and Cumberland settlements, or 
had scattered in scalping parties to appear and disappear in 
a night. The most restless of the savages were the Chicka- 
maugas, a small and independent band of Cherokees, youthful 
bucks themselves, and likely to be joined at times by the roving 
youngsters of the other tribes. They had caused Colonel Mar- 
tin, in his efforts to keep the frontiers quiet, more anxiety than 
any of the other tribes, and he had, under varying fortunes, 
advanced upon them and retired time and again. Of late, 
Knox, the secretary of war, had kept the local forces as much 
on the defensive as could be done, in the hopes that the provo- 
cations to war would cease. It was the hostility of this ruthless 
band, after Sevier had lost his hold upon the abortive Franklin 
commonwealth, which had induced the settlers south of the 
Holston and French Broad rivers to unite for protection, despite 
any appeal for forbearance. 

It is not easy to reach any satisfactory estimate of the num- 
bers at this time of these southern tribes. There were, perhaps, 
two thousand five hundred warriors among the Cherokees, and 
they came in closer contact with the Americans than any others, 
and had of late been talking of migrating beyond the Missis- 
sippi. They had easily learned the timely art, when the whites 
pushed them too hard, of sending eomphiints to the authorities. 
" We are drove as it were into the sea," they said on one occa- 
sion. " We have hardly land sufficient to stand upon. We 
are neither fish nor birds. We cannot live in tlie water, nor 
in the air J " They were fond of making treaties, and not very 
faithful In the observance of them. 

The Creeks were more numerous, and spent tlieir varying 
rage more readily upon the Georgians, who, with the Span- 
iards in Florida, were their nearest neighbors on the east and 
south. Tlie Choctaws were supposed to be much more nu- 
merous than the nearer tribes, but their remoteness generally 
prevented more than small parties of vagrant warriors joining 
the other tribes. The Chickasaws were as a rule the most tract- 
aide of all. They were a handsome race, and rode a fine breed 
of horses. 

Note. —The opposite map of the Creek country, and the home of McGillivray, is from a map 
of Georgia in Carey's American Alias, Philadelphia, 1795. 



384 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

The year 1790 had opened with some warnings of a new com- 
bination among the sonthern Indians. One William Angustns 
Bowles, a young English vagabond, who had been in the Eng- 
lish army during the Revolution, had for some years espoused 
the English, Spanish, or American interests indifferently, and 
had played fast and loose with savage and civilized life by 
turns. He now compacted portions of the Creeks and Chero- 
kees, and induced them to send him and some of their tribes- 
men to England, bearing an address to the British king. The 
party managed to reach the Bahamas, where Lord Dunmore 
furnished them a passage to Halifax, and in July, 1790, they 
were at Quebec. Here Dorchester tried to detain them, but 
they insisted on going to London, where they presented the ad- 
dress, and promised to put their tribes under British protection, 
and asked for arms and other help. Meanwhile, among the fac- 
tions of those tribes, where an active rival of Bowles was more 
powerful, an effort had been made during 1789 to unite them 
in a league against the whites. This plot, in August, 1789, 
had come to the knowledge of Colonel Arthur Campbell, and 
he had communicated the news to Washington. 

This other leader, whom we have already mentioned as the 
son of a Scotch trader by a Creek woman, whose father had 
been French, had already made the name of Alexander McGil- 
livray notorious along the border, for, during the Revolutionary 
War, he had, like Bowles, been active in the royal interest. 
His losses by confiscation in that contest had spurred him with 
a revenge which of late years had been well known to the bor- 
derers. He was a man of an active intellect, and not lacking in 
educational training. In physical bearing he was a noticeable 
figure : sjiare of limb, but lofty in stature, while under a beet- 
ling brow he moved with great alertness a pair of large and 
lustrous eyes. He had an Indian's wary artfulness, a French- 
man's grace of demeanor, and something of the Scotchman's 
canniness and love of trade. He was under binding obligations 
to the Spaniards, and as we have seen in his communication 
with jVIiro, he did not mean to forget them, while he was ready 
to settle with their rivals, hoping in each case to serve his own 
interests. As a go-between in the Indian trade he had his 
price, and the London house of Strahan & Co., acting in Pensa- 
cola, found him convenient in negotiating for trading permits 



McGILLIVRAY. 385 

with the Spanish officials, who were said to receive more than 
X12,000 a year from that commercial house. It is hardly to be 
denied that McGillivray got a good store from both of the bar- 
gainers. He had before this sought to make the Georgians buy 
at a good price an immunity from the raids of his people, and 
on their refusal he had taught them that his price was much 
less than the cost of war. 

In this pass, Georgia, whose frontiers faced the Creeks all 
along the Altamaha and Oconee, had appealed to the general 
government for aid, at a time when rumors multiplied in New 
York that Spain was inciting the Creeks, and the English the 
Shawnees, to make a general war. 

Knox saw in a Creek war a pretty certain forerunner of 
one with Spain, and having some intimations of McGillivray's 
greed, importuned Washington to invite that leader to come 
to the seat of government. At the same time he prepared for 
a failure by dispatching troops to the Georgia frontiers. The 
messenger of peace was Colonel Willet. The invitation was 
accepted, and in June McGillivray and twenty-eight of the 
principal men of the Creeks, marching through the New York 
streets under an escort of Tammany sachems, were conducted to 
General Knox's house, where McGillivray was lodged. 

As in all Indian negotiations, the interchange of views went 
on slowly, amid untoward rumors. Mirb, with his usual suspi- 
cion, which was not wholly removed by McGillivray's parting- 
letter, was tliought to have sent an agent after the Creeks to 
spy out their acts in New York and prevent action hostile to 
Spain by a free distribution of gifts. It was at the same time 
believed that an Iroquois agent had cautioned McGillivray of 
the risks he was taking, and had tried to lead him to an alliance 
with the northern tribes. 

But no allurements could turn the greedy ambassador from 
his purpose after the government had disclosed to him their 
generous intentions. In consideration of the Creeks' recognition 
of the United States as their guardians, and acknowledging the 
protection " of no other nation whatsoever," the American 
negotiators confirmed to the Creek chieftain and his friends 
the sole privilege of trade with that tribe, and agreed to make 
good with 1100,000 that leader's losses in the Revolutionary 
War. The government ceded back to the Creeks certain territo- 



386 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

ries which had made the Oconee the line of the whites, and which 
Georgia had paid for. This act later aroused the indignation 
of Patrick Henry, who had invested in some of these same 
lands, and who, as he professed, had hoped to find a refuge 
there from the despotism which he sometimes believed was to 
transplant the republicanism of his country. 

The authorities further created McGillivray a brigadier-gen- 
eral in the American army, with a yearly stipend of )fl,200. 
So, in good humor, that chieftain doffed his new uniform and 
signed the treaty. It mattered little to him that, at the same 
moment, he held both from the Spanish and English govern- 
ments other commissions. Washington, as he said, had greatly 
honored him in giving him some books and his own epaulets, 
which he took with him on his home journey by sea, landing at 
St. Mary's in Georgia. 

While in New York, McGillivray wrote to Lord Dorchester : 
" In the present treaty I have been ol)liged to give up some- 
thing in order to secure the rest, and guarding at the same 
time against what might shake my treaty with Spain." Such 
double-faced professions, however, did not succeed. The treaty 
with Spain had, for a large faction of the Creeks, been im- 
periled too greatly ; and the United States had bargained with 
a deceiver. The hostilities at the south saw little abatement, 
and Spain continued to have an ally in the irate Creeks. 

But these Indian affairs suffered an eclipse in the sudden 
apparition of war along the Mississippi, and the McGillivray 
treaty was doubtless hastened by it, for the United States was 
at once brought face to face with a serious problem, in the solu- 
tion of which she needed a free hand. It is necessary to go 
back a little and see how the Mississippi question seemed has- 
tening to a conclusion at the time the Spanish complication with 
England turned the federal government from an aggressive to 
a waiting mood. 

Gardoqui, on returning to vSpain in 1789, had given there the 
impression that the navigation of the Mississippi had ceased to 
be a burning question on the American seaboard. He gave as 
a reason for this apathy that the drain upon the coast popula- 
tion, through the opening of the river, would cause a setting 
back of the prosperity of the older States. There was also a 



CHARACTER OF THE WEST. 387 

prevalence of fear that the free river passage to the sea of 
tobacco, now becoming an important staple in Kentucky, would 
bring a powerful competitor into the market for the product 
of Virginia and Maryland, whose soil was already becoming 
exhausted. 

With these views accepted, there could but be in Spain an 
imperfect comprehension of the real attitude of the western 
country, and there was doubtless in some parts of the American 
east hardly l)etter information. Nor was there an adequate 
conception of revived Spanish efforts to stoj) the Kentucky 
boats on the river. Miro at New Orleans could hardly have 
failed to observe the growing prosperity of the Americans about 
Natchez. Biissot had said, with French enthusiasm, that " the 
French and Spauiards settled at the Natchez have not for a 
century cultivated a single acre, while the Americans furnish 
the greater part of the provisions for New Orleans." We have 
seen how the attempts of the South Carolina Company to ex- 
tend this activity above Natchez had excited the governor's 
apprehensions. 

The fact was that the Declaration of Independence had failed 
to make quite the same sort of self-centred Americans west of 
the mountains as had been created on their eastern slope. The 
western life was breeding a more dauntless and aggressive race, 
which rejoiced rather in obstacles, and placed upon a higher 
plane than human law the rights which they felt belonged to 
them by nature. They were not a little impati<nit to have their 
right to an open navigation of tlie Mississijipi based upon 
treaty obligations, as acquired from France by England in 1763, 
and transmitted to the Republic from the mother countiy in 
1782. They looked by preference to the inalicniable rights of 
their position on the upper waters of the Great River, as carry- 
ing an incontestable claim to a free passage to the ocean. What 
Thomas Walcott, journeying on the Ohio in 1700, heard in 
a debating (dub in Marietta gave an unmistakable indication 
of the prevailing temper. There was, as he says, a diversity of 
si'ntiment as to the treatment of Spanish arrogance, while all 
were of one mind in the certainty, within a few years, of the 
river being opened " by strength or force, if not by right or 
treaty." 

By 1790, the danger which had been felt, of accomplishing 



388 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

this result by some pact of the western leaders with Spain, had 
practically vanished before the rising power of the constitu- 
tional Kepublic, which had marshaled men in new ranks, mak- 
ing bold those who had been timid, and conservative those who 
had been aggressive. It was this change that had caused Wil- 
kinson to tremble for his power. When he saw Washington 
putting in office at the west the known enemies of Spain, he 
had grasped the hand of OTallon almost in despair. Conceiv- 
ing that Congress suspected him, he had written to Miro : 
" My situation is extremely painful, since, abhorring duplicity, 
I must dissemble." Miro, on his part, was aware that all Wil- 
kinson's abettors, save Sebastian, had fallen away from him. 
The latter was by this time reduced to begging a gratuity from 
the Spanish governor, who seemed by no means sure that the 
time had not come for pensioning each of the confederate trai- 
tors, in order that he might use one as a spy upon the other. 

In this condition of things the intriguers could well be left to 
spoil their own game, and the federal government were freer 
far than the confederation had been to deal with the pretenses 
of Spain, both as to the river and as to the territory which she 
coveted to the east of it. From the time when she was con- 
niving with France to deprive the United States, by the Treaty 
of Independence, of a large part of the western country, Spain 
had indeed abated something from the claims which would have 
given her all west of a line drawn from the St. Mary's River 
to the Muscle Shoals, and down the Tennessee and Ohio to the 
Mississijipi. Later, she had sought to accomplish her purpose 
by the conspiracies of Wilkinson. While these were pending 
with diminishing chances of success, Spain had been prac- 
ticing all that vexatious hesitancy which has always charac- 
terized her diplomacy. The time had come for this to cease, 
as Jefferson thought, and in August, 1790, he instructed Car- 
michael, then the American representative in Madrid, to bring 
matters to a crisis, urged thereto, doubtless, as we shall see, by 
the precarious relations which had arisen between Spain and 
England. Jefferson's instructions were to assume the right of 
navigating the Mississippi, and to raise a question only about 
a port of deposit near its mouth. At the same time, he advised 
Short, in Paris, to persuade Montmarin, the Spanish ambas- 
sador in that capital, to further the American suit. In the 



2HE NORTHWEST COAST. 389 

heads which Jefferson drew up for Carmichael's guidance 
(August 22), he says that more than half the American terri- 
tory is in the Mississippi basin, where two hundred thousand 
people, of whom forty thousand can bear arms, are impatient of 
Spanish delays. If we cannot by argument force Spain to a 
conclusion, he adds, we must either lose this western people, 
who will seek other alliances, or we must, as we shall, wrest 
what we want from her. If Spain will only give us New 
Orleans and Florida, he adds fnrther, she should see that we 
are in a position to help her protect what lies beyond the Mis- 
sissij^pi. This was a direct l)id for a Spanish alliance in 
the sudden complications which had arisen upon the action of 
a few Spanish ships on the Pacific coast, and, in September, 
false rumors prevailed in New York that Spain had made the 
concession. 

To understand this Pacific entanglement, it is necessary to 
take a brief retrospect. 

The fur trade of the northwest coast was a prize for which 
Spain and England liad long been contending. The efforts to 
find an overland passage had been far more striking with the 
English, while the Spaniards had for the most part pushed up 
the coast from California. 

As early as 1775, Cadotte, who had long been a trader at the 
Saidt Ste. Marie, had explored with Alexandt'r Henry north- 
west of Lake Superior, and, in their wandering, had fallen in 
with one Peter Pond. This adventurer was, according to some 
accounts, a native of Boston, but was probably born, as Ledyard 
had been, in Connecticut. He was strong in body, eager for 
hazards, intelligent in spirit, with a knack for scientific obser- 
vation, and an eye for mercantile profit without many scruples 
as to the method of it. He had, in April, 1785, in behalf of 
the North West Company of Montreal, a fur-ti-ading organiza- 
tion, addressed a memorial to Governor Hamilton at Quebec, 
proposing to undertake, in connection with other members of 
that company, the exploration of " the whole extent of that 
imknown country between the latitudes of 54° and 67° to the 
Pacific Ocean." He informs the governor that he had learned 
from the Indians that the Russians had already established a^ 
trading station on that coast, and that other posts were sure to 



390 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

be established there by Americans, who had been shipmates 
of Captain Cook. He further said that if the delivery of the 
lake posts, as contemplated in the treaty of 1782, was ever 
made, the way would be opened for enterprising Americans to 
reach by the Lake Superior route that distant region, and rein- 
force their countrymen, who had sought it by water. For these 
reasons he urged upon Hamilton the necessity of protecting 
the North West Company in the undertakings which they had 
outlined. 

The explorations of Pond about Lake Athabasca had con- 
vinced him, as his map, which has come down to us, shows, that 
the western end of that lake was not very far distant from the 
Pacific. The accounts of Cook's voyage had just then been pub- 
lished (1784-85), and a comparison of Cook's charts and this 
map, by differences of longitude, seemed to show that the fresh 
and salt waters were within a hundred miles of each other. On 
a map preserved in the Marine at Paris, and which is given by 
Brymner in his Canadian Archives Report for 1890, and which 
is said to be a coj^y of Pond's drawing made by Crevecoeur 
for La Rochefoucault, the coast of " Prince William Sound, as 
laid down by Captain Cook," is separated from tlie affluents of 
"Aranbaska Lake " by a coast range, beyond which, as the 
legend reads, the Indians say they have seen bearded men. As 
signifying an inviting route to the western sea. Pond had re- 
ported the climate of Athabasca as moderate, and said it was 
owing to the ocean winds, which we, in our day, recognize as 
the chinooks. 

Pond, as we have intimated, was not averse to playing off 
one master against another, and while he was assuring Hamil- 
ton that his interests were for Britain, he seems to have sent 
another copy of his map to Congress, which fell into Creve- 
coeur's hand, and upon a copy which he made, that traveler 
wrote of its author : " This extraordinary man has resided seven- 
teen years in those countries, and from his own discoveries, as 
well as from the reports of the Indians, he assures himself of 
having at last discovered a passage to the [western] sea." This 
memorandum is dated, " New York, 1 March, 1785." 

Note. — The map on the opposite page is a section of Pond's map (as reproduced in Brymner's 
Canndian Archives, 1890), showing tlie Grand Portage and the source of the Mississippi. Tiie 
river " Winipique" connects Lake Wiunipeg with the Lake of tlie Woods. 



392 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

But Pond's ambition to reach the Pacific had not been accom- 
plished when, in 1790, Vancouver was on that coast, establish- 
ing new claims for England. He passed, without knowing it, 
the mouth of the great river that heads near the springs of the 
Missouri. It was left for the Boston ship " Columbia," under 
Captain Kendrick, in the same season, to enter that river and 
bestow the name of his vessel upon it. 

Not far from the same time, Spain and England, the two 
great European rivals for North America, who were each intent 
on contracting the limits of the young Republic, came into colli- 
sion on the western coast of Vancouver's Island. Spain, by 
virtue of Balboa's discovery in 1513, and subsequent explora- 
tions up the coast, and England, by reason of Drake's assump- 
tion of New Albion in 1579, and the recent explorations of 
Cook and others, set their respective claims to this region in 
sharp conflict. Spain, being at the moment more powerful at 
Nootka Sound, seized some English vessels trading there. It 
was this act that was now likely to bring the armed forces of 
the rivals to leveling muskets on the Mississippi, and to open a 
conflict of which the United States, with grudges against each of 
the contestants, might find it difficult to be a passive observer. 

When the news of the seizure at Nootka reached England, 
and it was known that the Spanish authorities had simply 
released the captured ships without making reparation, the Eng- 
lish king, on May 5, 1790, announced in Parliament that war 
with Spain was imminent. Great activity followed in the dock- 
yards and arsenals. Louisiana was at once recognized as the 
most vulnerable part of the Spanish empire. To engage the 
western Indians for a campaign against New Orleans by the 
river, large stores of gifts were hastily sent to Canada; Dor- 
chester was, at the same time, instructed to secure if possible the 
active aid of the United States, and, in case this failed, he was 
told to play upon the passions of some of the disaffected regions 
of the Republic. While the northern and southern factions of 
the country were being brought to a sharp issue on the question 
of a site for a capital, and were seeking at the same time to 
play off Vermont and Kentucky against each other in the 
balance of power, by fixing periods for their admission to the 
Union, the British government was seeking to make a bi,'each 




NORTHWEST COAST. 

[Showing Nootka Sound as on the main land, when really on the outer coast of Vancouver's 
Island; also Mackenzie's track and the supposed waters west of Lake Superior and Hudson's 
r.ay. The map is a part of a " Chart of the N. W. Coast of America, showing discoveries lately 
made," in Jedediah Morse's American Universal Geography, Boston, 1st ed., 1789: 4th ed., 
1802.] 



394 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

between each of those States and the Union. It was thought 
that the discontent in Vermont, not wholly stilled by the out- 
come of Yorktown, was rendered at this jnncture peculiarly 
susceptible while she was appealing to a laggard Congress to 
give her sisterhood in the Union. So Dorchester was instructed 
to open communication with such as he could approach. 

A convention in the Kentucky country was about deter- 
mining to take final measures for securing Statehood, — it was 
to take place in July, — but it was not certain that the majority 
for it would be lai'ge. To take advantage of any such indiffer- 
ence, Dorchester was further instructed to picture to the Ken- 
tuckians the advantages which would accrue if they accepted 
the help of England to force the Spaniards from the Missis- 
sippi. There was also, Dorchester was expected to show, an 
vnunistakable gain for them in an English alliance in open- 
ing the lakes and the St. Lawrence for the export of their 
produce. Such were the terms of Grenville's dispatches to the 
Canadian governor in May, 1790, at the time that prepara- 
tions were making in England for a Spanish war. 

The conditions on all sides were perplexing. Great Britain 
was anxious lest war with Spain would give the Americans an 
op))ortunity to wrest from their feeble garrisons the lake i)Osts, 
and there was danger that such hostilities miaht lead to the 
dispatch of a crowd of privateers from the American ports. 
There was a chance that the military power of the Republic 
would have more than it could do to protect and hold in alle- 
giance the western coimtry, and Dorchester's information from 
the Ohio region was encouraging to British hopes. He learned 
that the " discontented Continental soldiers " at the Muskingum 
colony were " attached to the United States by no other tie 
than personal regard for the President, considering themselves 
sacrificed by Congress, and defrauded even in the sales of the 
lands they occupy ; " and this feeling, said a correspondent, 
gave them " an extreme tenderness toward the British govern- 
ment." 

Early in the year, Dorchester had sent to the States an emis- 
sary on an ostensibly friendly errand, but really to spy out the 
feelings of the peo^sle, and to ascertain what preparations were 
in hand for any armed excursion. This messenger was a cer- 
tain Major Beckwith, and his instructions were dated on June 



WASHINGTON'S CABINET. 395 

27. He was specially directed to learn the chances of the 
United States joining England in the threatened war, and the 
likelihood of their resisting the persuasions of Spain to rely 
upon her aid in attacking the lake posts. Dorchester had an 
American correspondent, who was assuring him that General 
Knox would be only too glad to attack the Spanish posts on 
the upper Mississippi, while an English fleet forced the river 
from the Gulf. This letter-writer had outlined a further plan 
of a joint expedition to the Santa Ee region, the west being 
counted on to recruit an adequate force from its three hundred 
thousand iidiabitants. This occupation of the S})anisli mines 
was a fuvorite aim with Dorchester, and he had in contempla- 
tion to found a base for such an expedition on the Mississippi, 
north of the Missouri, whence it was onl}' eight days' march to 
Santa Ee, through a country fit for military operations. It was 
certain that Spain feared such an attack, and was striving to 
strengthen her Indian alliances beyond the Mississippi, and 
was seeking to induce the Indians on the east of that I'iver to 
migrate to the other bank, and her persuasion had had some 
influence among the Cherokees. 

The policy of the United States, so far as Washington's cab- 
inet was to form it, rested in councils far from harmonious. 
Hamilton could not forget the irritating vacillation of Spain 
during the Revolution, and her inimical conduct ever since. 
He thought she had no reason to expect that the United States 
would shield her from British enmity. He was, on one point 
at least, in sympathy with Jefferson in contending that Si)ain 
must either open the Mississippi or take the consequences. " If 
Great Britain sides with us," he said, " and France with Spain, 
thei-e will l)e a revolution in our foreign politics." When Beck- 
with sought to sound him, Hamilton was cautious, and rather 
vaguely promised an alliance with England " as far as may be 
consistent with honor." 

Jefferson's anti-English views were too notorious for England 
to expect any countenance from him. Dorchester had been 
warned of this, though his American correspondent assured 
him that the Americans, as a body, were " by no means favor- 
able to Spanish interests." It was Jefferson's belief that a 
Spanish war — with the Americans neutral — would be sure 
to throw both Louisiana and Elorida into the hands of Britain. 



396 UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

This would mean, he contended, that England, possessing the 
west bank of the Mississippi, would control the trade of the 
east bank, and hold the navigation of that river as the price 
and lure of an alliance with the western States. It would, 
moreover, surround the Republic on all the land sides with 
British power and with British fleets at the seaward. It was, 
perhaps, some consolation to him, in a possible alliance of the 
States with England, that, in the division of the spoils of war, 
Florida might fall to the Americans. His expectation was 
that France could not help being drawn into the war on the 
side of Sixain, and if the States could maintain neutrality he 
saw a chance of "the New World fattening on the follies of 
the Old." If American neutrality could not be preserved, he 
much preferred that the Republic should take sides with Spain. 
For this end he was ready to guarantee the trans-Mississippi 
region to Spain, if she would cede New Orleans and Florida 
to the United States. He thought that to enter upon the war 
in this way would induce a popular support, and that Spain 
should agree to subsidize the Americans, if such a stand brought 
on a conflict with England. To prepare for such a consumma- 
tion, Jefferson instructed Carmichael to let the Spanish court 
understand that, if such a plan was not acceded to, there might 
be great difficulty in restraining the west. Such a guarantee 
of the distant west was not, fortunately, in the way when Jef- 
ferson himself, not many years later, bargained for this same 
Louisiana, and forgot how he had so recently professed that 
the United States would not for ages have occasion " to cross 
the Mississippi." 

There was one consideration which, in case of war, had caused 
Washington much uneasiness. It was whether Dorchester 
would, with or without permission, cross the American territory 
to reach the Mississippi, in an effort to descend to New Orleans. 
The President consulted his cabinet in August on the stand to 
take in case Dorchester should ask permission. His advisers 
were at variance, as before. Hamilton was for allowing the 
passage rather than hazard hostilities. Jefferson said that, 
while circumstances did not warrant giving the negative which 
the request deserved, it was best to avoid an answer, and if the 
passage was made, to treasure the memory of it against a time 



THE DILEMMA OF SPAIN. 397 

of England's distress. Adams, the Vice-President, differed only 
from Jefferson in advising a dignified refusal and waiting till 
an indemnity could be enforced. 

The dilemma of Spain was the most serious of all. She rec- 
ognized that the United States might assist her, but she was not 
prepared to pay the cost, and she knew what risks she was run- 
ning of an Anglo-American alliance, with the aim of forcing 
the Mississippi. 

So the Spanish policy was to shuffle as long as it would be 
prudent ; to embroil France if she could ; to organize an In- 
dian expedition against the Pacific posts of the English, and 
take advantage of developments. 

Affairs in this way could not drift long, with such a deter- 
mined adversary as England, and on October 28 Florida Blanca 
yielded to the British demands, and so avoided war, in conclud- 
ing the convention of Nootka, wherein he acknowledged the 
equal rights of England on the Pacific coast. When, on No- 
vember 12, the ratifications were exchanged, England ceased 
to be a factor in the Mississippi question. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

The federal government in coming to power found tlie North 
and the South not unequally matched. Pennsylvania and the 
States northward showed about two million inhabitants, and 
thei-e was an equal jjojjulation in Maryland with the farther 
south. It was thought that the valuation of the thirteen States 
was approximately $800,000,000, and this aggregate was nearly 
equally divided between the two sections. In some aspects of 
business activity, they were also nearly equal, and the -f 5,000,- 
000 exports of the North could be set against a corresponding 
sum for the South. In domestic trade the Nortli doubtless 
held some preponderance, for the one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand tons of shipping engaged in fishing and in coastwise traffic 
was mainly owned and employed in the North, and this section 
claimed a large part of the three hundred and sixty thousand 
tons engaged in the foreign trade. 

The territory which was assured to the United States by the 
treaty of independence, but which was as yet, west of the moun- 
tains, but precariously held for the most part, was variously 
reckoned, according to the imperfect estimates of the time, as 
between eight and nine hundred thousand square miles. Of 
this imperial domain, not far from two thirds was unoccuiued 
except by vagrant Indians. The great bulk of the four million 
people, whom the world was learning to call Americans, occu- 
pied a region stretching along the Atlantic seaboard. It ex- 
tended back to a line which roughly followed the crest of the 
somewhat disjointed Appalachian range, and measured from 
Maine to Florida not far from three thousand miles. This 
more compactly settled territory which the French maps repre- 
sented as the United States, and in this were followed by some 
English maps, contained not far from two hundred and twenty- 
five thousand square miles, or probably a scant quarter of the 



POPULATION OF THE WEST. 399 

entire acreage of the Republic. Of the gross population of 
four million, considerably less than half a million souls were 
scattered occupants of the remaining three quarters of the 
national domain. There was great uncertainty in estimating 
this outlying population. Some placed it as low as two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand, while others reckoned it at over four 
hundred thousand, and it was thought it had the caj^ability of 
doubling, through immigration and the prevalence of large 
families, in fifteen years. Burke had said of it, when Parlia- 
ment was struggling with the problem of controlling it : '' Your 
children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood, than the 
Americans spread from families to communities, and from 
villages to nations." Much the larger part of this western 
population was settled in confined areas, isolated by stretches 
of wilderness, and thickest along the streams in West Virginia, 
western Penns^dvania, Kentucky, and Tennessee. There were 
only the beginnings of settlements north of the Ohio, except as 
one moved on to the Wabash, the Illinois, and the Mississippi, 
where the mongrel communities, originally French, at Viu- 
cennes and Kaskaskia, were encountered, mixed with Canadian 
traders and Spanish interlopers. This isolated class offered a 
life little consonant with that which the American pioneers were 
establishing in the intervening country. 

There is the same uncertainty in aj^portioning this aggregate 
over-mountain population among the several districts. Perhaps 
there were seventy thousand, or as some reckoned nearer one 
hundred thousand, which found a centre in Pittsburg. This 
Pennsylvania folk stretched up the Alleghany and Mononga- 
liela, and their lateral valleys, and there was some talk of their 
ultimately acquiring Statehood. Kentucky, which with respect 
to soil and climate was usually spoken of as more favored than 
any other American region, claimed to have about seventy-four 
thousand inhabitants, including twelve or thirteen thousand 
blacks. It is still more difficult to determine the population 
of Tennessee, divided between the Holston and Cumberland 
regions. The enumeration has gone as high as eighty thousand 
and as low as thirty or forty thousand. 

The immigrants to these regions south of the Ohio had prob- 
ably, in the largest numbers, come from Virginia, now the most 
populous of the thirteen States.' The impoverishing of Vir- 



400 THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

ginia soil by tobacco was serving to increase the spread of her 
people beyond the mountains. The current was not yet wholly 
checked, which in the middle of the century had brought other 
pioneers from Pennsylvania and Maryland through the valley 
of the Shenandoah on the way to the Kanawha and beyond. 

The opening of the river route from tlie Mouongahela to 
Limestone on the Ohio, " the most beautiful river " of the 
world, as it was customary to call it, had diverted a large part 
of the stream of adventurous settlers, but they mostly went to 
Kentucky, for there was still difficulty in the land questions on 
the Muskingum, which was preventing its full share of the 
intending settlers. Further south, an emigrant stream was con- 
stantly passing from Carolina. 

There was possibly a preponderance of English blood in all 
these diversified currents ; but the Scotch-Irish and the Ger- 
mans were numerous enough to give a strengthening fibre 
in this mingling of ethnic strains. There was, in this south- 
western race, little mixture of the New England stock, though 
a few families from Connecticut and Massachusetts had made 
a mark among them. This northern element, however, was 
just beginning to assert itself north of the Ohio, in communi- 
ties destined to become more mixed in blood than those south 
of that river. The Ohio Company, as we have seen, had taken 
shape in the New England spirit. The region between the two 
Miamis was controlled by the racial quality of the middle 
States. The lands reserved for bounties to the Virginia sol- 
diers, something over four million acres, and more open to In- 
dian attacks than other parts of the northwest, invited still 
other individualities. When Chillicothe was founded, Kentucky 
and Tennessee sent thither a restless horde. In this there was 
good blood mixed with less desirable strains coming from the 
poorer elements of Holston and Carolina. It was left for New 
England to restore a good average Avhen the Western Reserve 
along Lake Erie came to be settled, its reputation for having 
a damp and cold soil tending to deter immigration for some 
years. 

It is generally computed that there were, in 1790, nearly 
four thousand three hundred people, other than Indians, north 
of the Ohio. Of these there were about a thousand in and 
around Marietta, to be increased during the year by more than 



THE ILLINOIS SETTLEMENTS. 401 

one hiindred and thirty new families. The hostility of the 
Indians prevented their hunters going far beyond the support 
of their armed guards, and the buffalo by this time had dis- 
appeared from Kentucky, except about the sources of some of 
the rivers, and were rarely to be found north of the Ohio, 
unless in similar feeding-grounds near the fountains of the 
northern tributaries of that river. So a scarcity of food was 
not an unusual condition, and, during the early months of 1790, 
there had been danger of famine but for the kind help of a 
Virginia hunter and farmer, who was settled on the opposite 
side of the Ohio. The next year, however, the crop pi-oved a 
good one. 

On the lands of J udge S ynimes, between the Great and 
Little Miami, there were reckoned to be one thousand three 
hundred souls. St. Clair, in January, had visited these settle- 
ments, and set them up as the county of Hamilton, and made 
at Cincinnati the seat of government for the shire. 

The settlement on the Wabash was supposed to have about 
a thousand souls, among whom St. Clair early in the year had 
been, and had found them thriftless. They were dreading a 
scarcity of food, and the governor relieved them. He olificially 
confirmed their occupancy of the lands, which had been origi- 
nally secured to them under the French rule. Another thou- 
sand of this trans-Ohio population was to be found in the other 
old French settlement at Kaskaskia and in the adjacent region. 
St. Clair had found these also fearing a famine, and he had 
issued orders to prevent the Spanish, in St. Louis, crossing the 
river to kill buffalo and to carry off the timber. This scarcity 
of food had driven off a good many to join Morgan's settlement 
at New Madrid, and it was the general complaint that much of 
their distress was owing to the failure of Virginia to pay for 
the supplies which they had furnished to George Eogers Chirk 
twelve years before. These difficulties were .increased by the 
obscuring of land titles, which a transfer of allegiance had pro- 
duced, and St. Clair had had poor success in endeavors to 
remedy the evil. He found that the passage of supplies by 
ascending the Mississippi from the Ohio was jeopardized by the 
velocity of the current, and he at once urged upon the federal 
government the construction of a road for a distance of fifty or 
sixty miles, leaving the Ohio at Fort Massac, so that the region 



402 THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

could be better brought into communication with the crops of 
Kentucky. There was urgent need of some such closer connec- 
tion, for St. Louis, now a flourishing village, was drawing away 
the old settlers of Kaskaskia and Cahokia. This was particu- 
larly the case with slave-owners, for there was a widespread 
belief that the ordinance of 1787 would eventually work the 
emancipation of their blacks. It was charged that Morgan 
was encouraainff this view in order to obtain accessions to his 
colony. To place the federal interests in this distant region 
under more efficient supervision, St. Clair, on leaving for his 
headquarters in June, 1790, placed them under the immediate 
control of Winthroji Sargent, the secretary of the Northwest 
Territory. 

In turning from this older alien element and ascending the 
Ohio, the newer and luckless French colony, for whose coming 
Putnam had been preparing, did not escape St. Clair's atten- 
tion. He says he found about four hundred souls here, " not 
usefully employed and much discontented." There were a hun- 
dred more at Muskingum, and another hundred at Buffalo Creek, 
waiting to move on with the opening season. The beginnings 
of this movement have been recounted in an earlier chapter. 

The Scioto Company, of which Joel Barlow, as already 
explained, was now the principal agent in Europe, had aimed 
to attract the longings and cupidity of the French people by 
presenting what he called the allurements of the American 
wilderness. The French government suspected the snare, and 
endeavored to warn the eager victims by caricatures, as we 
have seen, but to little purpose. By wanton promises, Barlow 
succeeded in selling a hundred thousand acres of what he pro- 
fessed was the company's domain to hundreds of deluded cli- 
ents. Among them were ten persons of some notoriety, if not 
consideration, who had been founders of the National Assem- 
bly. There was a reckless folly in these people, who were seek- 
ing to escape from France, qiiite equal to that of those who 
were beginning to make that country the abhorrence of Europe. 
Brissot, who was also a member of the Assembly, and who had 
l)een in America two years before, was chattering in the cafes 
in the vein in which he was the next year, in a published book, 
to help on the movement. He warned the loyal aristocrats, who 



THE SCIOTO COMPANY. 



403 



showed a tenclenej^ to fly from what was coming-, that in thus seek- 
ing " to preserve their titles, their lionors, and their privileges, 
they would fall into a new society [in America] , where the titles 




[From The Commerce of Americn u-ith Europe, bj' Brissot de Warville, etc, London, 1794.] 

of i)ride and chance are despised and even unknown." He 
pointed out how Barlow's enterprise appealed rather to the 
poor, " who are deprived of the means of sj;bsistence by the 
revolution," and who would find open to them " an asylum 
where they could obtain a property." So this infatuated 
Frenchman seconded the debased purposes of the Scioto schem- 



404 THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

ers, and went on generalizing, after his somewhat amusing prac- 
tice, from evidence insufficient but useful in his task. Barlow, 
meanwhile, was busy oiling his machinery. On February 28, 
1790, he wrote to St. Clair to bring to his "notice and protec- 
tion a number of industrious and honest emigrants," who were 
seeking new homes on the Ohio, " under the direction of Messrs. 
Barth and Thiebauld." Knox, similarly informed, somewhat 
later, on May 19, told St. Clair that these Frenchmen were to 
settle on lands " contracted for by Messrs. Cutler & Co.," and 
asked the governor to protect them. Barlow further, with a 
refined cruelty, wrote to Duer, his principal in New York, urg- 
ing him not to omit any measures which could create good first 
impressions in these misguided wanderers, for twenty thousand 
more, as he said, would soon follow the pioneers. He asked 
him to have houses ready for them on a spot oj^posite the mouth 
of the Kanawha, against the arrival of these forerunners. On 
this representation, Rufus Putnam, lending himself blindly 
to a nefarious scheme, which subsequently cost him $2,000 for 
unrecompensed outlays, in the late winter, while in New York, 
contracted on behalf of the Scioto Company with one Major 
John Burnham to go with a party and erect cottages on the spot 
which Barlow had designated, then known by the Indian name 
of Chicamago, but later called, as Putnam says, Galliopolis, 
a name soon contracted to Gallipolis. In May, 1790, just at 
the time when Knox was commending these foreign adventurers 
to the care of St. Clair, Burnham arrived at Marietta with fifty 
men and a store of provisions to last till December, when it 
was expected the work would be done. On June 4, Putnam 
gave him his instructions. He was to learn from Colonel R. 
J. Meigs on the spot where he was to place the four ranges of 
huts which he was to build. They were to be reared of round 
logs, with clay in the chinks, and with chimneys of like con- 
struction. Each range or block was to have at the end a large 
room for meetings and dancing. 

Some days later, this working party reached the site of the 
future settlement, supposed then, by some at least, to be within 
the area which Cutler had gained for the Scioto Company. To 
whomever it belonged, it was wholly unfit for occupancy, with 
all the germs of disease about it. 

While this work was progressing on the Ohio, there was 



GALLIPOLIS. 405 

among saner observers little confidence in the future of the 
undertaking-. Oliver Wolcott, who was a classmate of Barlow, 
and doubtless knew him well enough to distrust him, wrote of 
the movement : " In consequence of the Bill of Rights, agreed 
to by the National Assembly, an association has been formed 
for settling a colony in the western country. About one hun- 
dred Frenchmen have arrived with the national cockades in 
their hats, fully convinced that it is one of their natural rights 
to go into the woods of America and cut down trees for a 
living." 

The first comers had indeed just arrived in the Potomac, six 
lumdred souls in all, in five ships, which had left Havre just 
before New Year's. After a dreary passage of three months, 
these luckless vessels tied up at Alexandria on the Potomac. 
It was a motley crowd which they bore, and probably never 
forerunners of a colonizing scheme were so ill fitted in all but 
gayety of spirits for the task which was before them. There 
Avere carvers and artists with no annual salon to look forward 
for. There were gilders and friseurs with no expectation of a 
drawing-room. There were carriage-makers going to a country 
without a road. There were artisans to make tools without a 
farmer to wield them. 

It was summer before this extraordinai*y crowd started their 
caravans over the mountains, or at least such part of them as 
had not had their eyes opened and refused to go. Those that pro- 
ceeded were discontented, and showed a refractory spirit. The 
provisions that were furnished them proved poor, and if they 
tried to procure other supplies of the farmers on the way, quar- 
rels were pretty sure to ensue. As they passed the Seven 
Ranges, there were no signs of the civilization for which Bar- 
low's lying map had prepared them. Once at the end of their 
journey, they discovered that their title-deeds covered lands 
which the grantors did not have to convey, and they perhaps 
remembered the truth of the Parisian caricatures. They found 
Burnham and his laborers looking to Putnam for their pay, and 
the company with which they had dealt was nowhere. 

It is difficult to place the entii^e responsibility of this shame- 
ful deceit. Barlow, as an agent, may perhaps have exceeded his 
instructions, though there is no evidence in his correspondence 
with his principals to show that they did anything to check his 



406 THE CONDITIONS OF 1700. 

rampant performances. If the Ohio Company is to be excul- 
pated, it was certainly Cutler's overdrawn descriptions which 
were dejiended upon to delude the poor souls. Barlow's defi- 
nite instructions from Duer and his associates have never been 
made known. The truth seems to be that these speculators, 
some of the first people of the land, as Cutler with some satis- 
faction called them, had counted upon buying continental securi- 
ties, while depressed under the weakness of the confederation, 
and using them at face for meeting their obligations for the 
land. The inauguration of the new government checked the 
depression and then enhanced the value of such notes, so that 
they could no longer be bought at the expected discount. This 
frustrated the schemers' plans. To make some amends to the 
deluded settlers, Duer and the Ohio Company agreed upon a 
transfer of some two hundred thousand acres from the company, 
upon which, in fact, by a miscalculation, the huts had been 
placed by Meigs and Burnham, but even this restitution in the 
end was futile, for Duer soon after became bankrupt, and every- 
thing was awry. 

For a time, however, it seemed as if the trustful Frenchmen 
got something for their money, and, occupying the fragile habi- 
tations which had been prepared, Gallipolis was fairly begun. 
But the fettered handicraftsmen, setting to their task, only 
found that their numbers grew less as the hardier of them 
became weary and deserted. It was no easy job to fell the 
enormous sycamores which stood where they needed to plant 
their fields. When the trees one by one fell, they found no 
way so easy of getting rid of the massive trunks as to dig 
trenches and bury them. Then their supplies grew scant, and 
famine stared them in the face. They were sometimes warned 
by the whoops of prowling savages, and they were beginning to 
think that these children of a benignant nature, which the 
French philosophers had told them about, were not after all 
the most innocent of neighbors. So they encountered shocks 
to their sentiments, and blows as to their physical natures. 

As autumn came on, they got all the comfort they could from 
the gracious messages of the governor, who dared to express to 
them the hope that, amid their trials, they had still found inde- 
pendence and happiness. He assured them that the rascality 
of the shameless deceivers would be punished by law, and that 



PUBLIC LANDS. 407 

the colonists would in the end have justice. He begged them 
to be patient a little longer, till arrangements for their security 
could be made, and the comfort of their community assured. 
St. Clair expressed his own views unreservedly to Knox on 
November 26, that "an interested speculation of a few men, 
pursued with too great avidity, will reflect some disgrace on the 
American character, while it involves numbers in absolute ruin 
in a foreign land.'' 

All this meant that there was need of much better discern- 
ment in the use of these Ohio lands than the recipients of the 
ordinance of 1787 had devised, and that the precluding of chi- 
canery should go along for honesty with the prevention of servi- 
tude. Hamilton had seen the evil easily to accompany tlie large 
speculative mania which Cutler and his colleagues stood for, 
and strove, but for the present unsuccessfully, to better the con- 
ditions in the disposition of these public lands. On July 22, 
1790, he made a report for unifying and controlling the sales, in 
which he proposed a general land office at the seat of govern- 
ment, with one local office in the northwest and another in the 
southwest, where sales could be made to actual settlers of not 
over a hundred acres to each. The Indian titles were first to be 
quieted. Tracts were then to be set aside to satisfy subscribers 
to the loans. Townships ten miles square were to be offei-ed 
for competition. There might in some cases be special contracts. 
But the main restraint was to be a fixed sum of thii'ty cents 
per acre, one quaiter cash, with security for the rest. It was 
an effort to control as much as ])ossible speculative values. In 
his report on the public credit, Hamilton had declared that 
cultivated lands in most of the States had fallen in value since 
the Revolution from twenty-five to fifty per cent., and in the 
remoter south still more. Western lands, he says, had been 
heretofore sold at a dollar an acre ; but this price was paid 
in depreciated paper, worth scarce a seventh of its face. But 
Congress was not yet i-eady for a movement as Hamilton pro- 
posed, and the owners of earlier grants were ready at all times 
to thwart any plans which would make the government their 
rival in the land market. 

The public lands of the west, from tlie time when the States 
had been urged to make cession of them, had been looked 



408 THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

upon as a source of income to meet the interest and pro- 
mote the payment of the national debt. So they played no 
insignificant part in shaping the financial policy of the new 
federal government. The movement instituted by Hamilton 
for resuscitating the credit of the government was complicated 
by political and sectional interests. The debt of the Union as 
a whole, resulting mainly from the war, was somewhere about 
-154,000,000. Of this there were 112,000,000 held in foreign 
lands, and tliis it was Hamilton's plan to pay at once. There 
were $42,000,000 of the government securities held by the peo- 
ple, and this was to be funded. In addition, there were $25,000,- 
000, which constituted the outstandiug debt of the individual 
States, and it was Hamilton's purpose that the federal govern- 
ment should assume this, with all its varying proportions among 
the States, and fund it also. On the policy of assuming these 
state obligations there was strong opposition on the part of 
those who were already grouping themselves on the side of 
state rights, and who saw iu the measure only a scheme for in- 
creasing the paternalism of the government. The debates of 
Congress were showing the mutual distrust of these antagonistic 
factions. The repelling influences of radical and conservative 
dispositions in domestic matters found other grounds for dif- 
ference in the commotions which were now agitating France^ 
and which had come home to the sensibilities of people in the 
untoward events whicli had founded Gallipolis. The so-called 
federal faction rested their plea for breaking the alliance with 
France on the downfall of the government of that country, 
which had made the treaty of 1778. Hamilton was the cham- 
pion of this position, as he was of the funding bill and of the 
using of the public lands for revenue. Jefferson, with French 
tastes and sympathies, as his enemies charged, was the natural 
opponent of Hamilton's " mercenary phalanx." The organs of 
these respective parties were the Gazette of the United States, 
as conducted by Fenno, in the interests of neutrality if not of 
English favor, and the National Gazette, which, under Fre- 
neau, outdid its rival in the bitterness which hypocrisy, intrigue, 
and falsehood combined to exemplify in Jefferson at a period of 
his life over which his admirers may well throw a veil. The 
blunt John Adams printed in Fenno's paper those Discourses 
on Davila in which the Jeffersonians found a plea for mon- 



HAMILTON'S FUNDING BILL. 409 

archy, abetting what Jefferson called Hamilton's monarehism 
" bottomed in corruption." It was not long- before like distinc- 
tions were again sliari)ly drawn, wlien the English packet 
brought over Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French liev- 
ohition, and when Tom Paine's Rights of 3Ian, in Ma}', 1791, 
found an echo in the hearts of the American sympathizers with 
France, who, as Jefferson said, welcomed the pamphlet of Paine 
as " likely in a single stroke to wipe out all the unconstitutional 
doctrines which the bell-wether [of the Federalists], Davila, 
has been preaching for a twelvemonth." 

While the question of sustaining or abandoning France 
caused perhaps warmer controversy in political circles, there 
was meanwhile no lack of ardor in the way in which Congress 
had discussed the question of a site for the new federal city. 
The question was decided by the most conspicuous example of 
political log-rolling which had yet disgusted the soberer citizens 
of the new Republic. This compromise prevented, as such 
plans are usually intended to prevent, a tension of political feel- 
ing that might turn threats into action. Severance of the Union 
was already intimated, and Washington pertinently asked "if 
the Eastern and Northern States are dangerous in the Union, 
will they be less so in separation ? " 

In May, 1790, the Senate rejected a bill to place the capital 
on the eastern branch of the Potomac. To prevent a site being 
selected farther north, and to sustain an earlier vote for placing 
the seat of government in " due regard to the particular situa- 
tion of the western country," the Senate, on June 28, considered 
a bill for forming a district ten miles square, on the Potomac, 
as the place for the federal city. It was at this point, and to 
reconcile the opposing demands of the two sections of the coun- 
try, that the political bargain, just mentioned, was made. Tlie 
future home of the government was determined to the advan- 
tage of the South, and as a recompense the debts of the States 
were assumed by the central government, to the gain of the 
North. So it was that Hamilton's funding bill passed both 
Houses, and on July 9, 1790, became a law ; and at the same 
time the residence of Congress was established at Philadel})hia 
till December, 1800, when the new capital was to be occupied. 

The bill, both as regards the financial scheme in touching the 
importance of western lands, and in respect to the location of 



410 THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

the capital, was in some sense a victory for the west. There 
were some, however, like Imlay, who regretted the permanency 
of the choice of the Potomac and thought the federal city should 
ultimately be transferred to the Great Valley, and find a 
home, for instance, near the Falls of St. Anthony. 

As against the Potomac, the advantages of a site on the Sus- 
quehanna were the most promising, because of the claims which 
were urged of its affoi'ding easier communication over the moun- 
tains with the west. It was shown that the distance from tide- 
water at Alexandria on the Potomac to the Monongahela and 
Pittsburg — the usual portal of the west — was three hundred 
and four miles with thirty-one miles of portage. Imlay says 
that it is asserted on the best authorities that the land carriage 
by this route may be reduced by further canalization of the 
rivers to less than twenty miles. This was the natural route 
from Baltimore and Richmond, and if the Ohio was reached by 
land only, it took a varying time, from ten to twenty days, to 
pass the mountains from the principal seaboard towns. 

From tide-water on the Susquehanna to Fort Pitt was two 
hundred and seventy-five miles, and if the route was carried up 
the Juniata, there was the easiest mouiitain pass of all, making 
a portage of twenty-three miles. Another but less favorable 
passage went by the west branch of the Susquehanna, leading 
to Toby's Creek and the Alleghany, and thence to the Ohio. 

There was still a way by which those passing west, either from 
Richmond or Philadeli)hia, entered the valley of the Shenan- 
doah, and proceeded to Fort Chissel on the Kanawha, near the 
North Carolina line. Thence the road led through Cumberland 
Gap. It was the usual ])ath by which those who sought a land 
carriage entered the leafy regions of Kentucky and so passed on 
to the rapids of the Ohio, now the liveliest spot in the west, 
and to Vincennes and Kaskaskia beyond. It was generally con- 
ceded at this time that Alexandria was nearer by one hundred 
and fifty miles to Kentucky than Philadelphia was, and twenty 
to thirty miles nearer than Baltimore was, and this last city 
was west of the real centre of population of the whole country. 
Philadelphia was now maintaining a weekly post by the Cum- 
bei'land Gap with the Kentucky settlements, and it traversed a 
road that in one place for a hundred miles was without a house, 
and the average rate was about twenty miles a day. If this 



WESTERN ROUTES. 411 

route shared the streams of travel westward with the water 
passage by the Ohio, the return by land was more usual in 
avoiilance of the straggle against the current of that river. 

Those who were bound for the Tennessee country, after strik- 
ino- the valley of the Holston, instead of turning to the right for 
Cumberland Gap, followed down that river to Fort Campbell, 
near where the Holston and Clinch unite to form the Tennessee, 
and then struck northwesterly over the mountains to the Cum- 
berland valley and so on to Nashville. Tlie distance from Fort 
Campbell was a little short of two hundred miles. Winter- 
botliam, a contemporary writer, speaks of this route as " a 
pleasant passage for carriages, as there will be only the Cum- 
berland Mountain to pass, and that is easy of ascent, and be- 
yond it the road is generally level and firm, and abounding with 
fine springs of water." Other descriptions of the time are not 
so attractive, and they tell of glowing ravines where patrols 
were sometimes met, and as night came on, there was some- 
thing startling in the click of the hoofs of the traders' pack- 
horses, hurrying to find a night's rest. The occasional log 
huts are spol^en of as filthy, with the roughest household furni- 
ture, for it was not till 1796 that frame houses began to appear 
along the way. 

At Nashville, the traveler found the inevitable whiskey-tap 
in its one variety store. The people were just beginning to 
open trade with New Orleans, sending thither, mainly by water, 
and running the gauntlet of the river pirates, the products of 
the region, — dried beef, hides, tallow, furs, corn, tobacco, and 
flax. Tliose who were not traders were apt to follow the hunt- 
er's trace, which ran from Nashville to Natchez, through the 
territory of the friendly Chickasaws. The portages which con- 
nected the Tennessee with the Florida rivers sometimes brought 
from the south the Spanish traders of Mobile and Pensacola. 

The i-outes thus far enumerated were generally adapted to 
indicate the Potomac as the best site for the proposed federal 
city, to which the water carriage on the Ohio was not so favora- 
ble. This easier passage to the two hundred thousand square 
miles, constituting the valley of the Ohio and its tributaries, 
was found by either the Alleghany or the Monongahela, and 
was now without a rival. The route westward by the Moliawk, 
across the valley of the Genesee to Niagara, was slow in devel- 



412 



THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 



oping, and the retention of the posts on the northern lakes 
operated against a passage by Oswego and the Great Lakes. 

The Ohio boat, now become a familiar object in western 
experience, was an anomalous construction of various sizes and 
shapes. It had sometimes a keel, but, on account of the diffi- 
culties of the return voyage, it was oftener built as cheaply as 
possible, with flat bottom and square corners. It was some- 
times constructed with stories, having a level or hipped roof 
atop, and was steered by a long sweep at the stern. The usual 




OHIO FLATBOAT. 

[From CoUot's Atlas.'\ 



cost of these cheaper builds was five dollars a ton, and a boat 
twelve feet beam and forty feet long — a common size ^ meas- 
ured about forty tons. Some of them were arranged for stall- 
ing domestic animals, and others afforded rough conveniences 
for domestic life, as the temporary homes of journeying immi- 
grants. The trading-boats sometimes passed on to a distant 
market, or tied up at the landings as they went for a local 
traffic. When his merchandise was disposed of, the trader 
usually sold his boat, and, on his next visit, he would find its 
plank and boards matched in new tenements or hucksters' 
booths, within the young town. It was of such material that 
Fort Harmar and other stockades had been built in part, the 
living forest supplying the rest. 

The cost of transportation from Philadelphia over the moun- 
tains, and thence by boat to Louisville, was reckoned at the 
rate of <£1,600 for forty tons ; but for the river passage alone, 
smaller merchandise was counted at a shilling per hundred- 
weight, or five shillings per ton for a bulky mass. Toulmin, 



RIVER NAVIGATION. 413 

buying a boat at Redstone, on the Monongahela, for £6-9-0, 
in which he carried 13 horses, 21 negroes, lo whites, and £100 
worth of merchantlise, took a fair samj)le of these trading out- 
fits. It was different with coarse articles, but fine manufactures 
coukl often, at this time, be sent from Philadelphia over the 
mountains, and be exposed for sale in the rough booths of the 
river settlements, where rent and taxes were of no account, at 
prices not much beyond those asked in Chestnut or Market 
streets on the Delaware ; and Philadelphia fashions, it was said, 
were in vogue in Frankfort in three months after they appeared 
in the Pennsylvania capital. The days of barter were passing, 
as money was brought in by innnigrants, or was brought up 
from New Orleans by the traders ; but still, slaves, horses, cat- 
tle, and pigs were not infrequently exchanged for calicoes, 
chintzes, and other fabrics. 

The most favorable season for these river passages was be- 
tween February and May, when the Ohio and Mississippi ran 
with full channel. The flatboats then sjied along from Pitts- 
burg to the Louisville rapids in eight or nine days. If they 
passed on to the Mississippi, they were sure to find it a headlong 
stream, even well into the summer, but during July it began to 
decrease in volume of water. It did not, however, at any time, 
rise to that height which it would have attained had all of its 
sixt}^ considerable affluents poured their spring tides into its 
bed at once. A devastating overflow was, in fact, prevented by 
these incoming rivers being affected by their local freshets at 
varying intervals. Recent calculations have shown that in 
high-water season the Mississippi might, by the simultaneous 
swelling of its branches, pour into the Gulf three million cubic 
feet of water a second, whereas, in fact, the outpour, because of 
this sequence of floods, is only about one million eight hundred 
thousand cubic feet. The velocity of the current from the 
mouth of the Ohio to Baton Rouge is from four and a half to 
five and a half feet per second, with full banks, and much 
swifter thence on to New Orleans. In such a current as this, the 
river boats made the run from the Ohio rapids to New Orleans 
in about twenty days. The usual practice of the pilots, to 
insure safety, was to cross from one concave shore to the other 
(reversing in going upstream), and to trust to the current when 
there was doubt about the channel. 



414 THE CONDITIONS OF 1790. 

At New Orleans, the trader usually sold his produce and the 
boat which had brought it. Going to Havana with his gains, 
he returned by sea to Philadelphia or Baltimore. There he put 
his money into fine fabrics, and returned home over the moun- 
tains and joined his family, from which he had been absent 
from four to six months. 

The smaller boats sometimes made the return trip by the 
river. There were often south winds to help them stem the 
current, and experienced boatmen knew how to take advantage 
of the eddying up-currents at the river bends. Such boats were 
sometimes back in Louisville in forty days. It was estimated 
that the coarse lading of ten boats of sixty tons each would 
pui'chase for the return a bulk of finer commodities which 
might be carried upstream in three boats of five tons each. 
Ascending the river was, however, too costly as yet to make it 
the rule, but it was beginning to be believed that from New 
Orleans to Louisville " by mechanical boats," the cost could be 
a-educed to one tenth. Fitch's steamboat on the Delaware was, 
however, hauled up to rot this very summer, and the jioor, dis- 
appointed inventor hardly dreamed of the time when a more 
perfect vessel, with river obstructions removed, should go in a 
single trip from Pittsburg to Fort Benton, in Montana, a dis- 
tance of four thousand three hundred and thirty-three miles, 
crossing very nearly the entire Mississippi drainage system, with 
its area of one million two hundred and sixty thousand square 
miles. But in August of the next year (1791) new improve- 
ments in steam-engines were patented by Fitch, Rumsey, and 
Stevens of Hoboken, and decided steps were registered in the 
solution of the great river problem. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

HARMAR's AND ST. CLAIR's CAMPAIGNS. 
1790-1791. 

The continued retention of the posts and the hostility of the 
Indians, closely connected as both the Americans and the In- 
dians felt, and as the British generally denied, was for the federal 
government the perplexing question in the northwest in the 
beginning of 1791. Jay, as Secretary of Foreign Affairs under 
the confederation, had, as we have seen, contended that the 
American breaclies of the treaty of 1782 were at least equal to 
those of the British, and that there was no good ground for 
amicable settlement as long as either contestant failed to purge 
his record. Jay was now Chief Justice of the Republic. It 
was possil)le that some test case might come before him, and 
the prospect was not a pleasant one to the ardent republicans. 
Jefferson was satisfied that the English ministry had no inten- 
tion of surrendering the posts, and was content to let the matter 
rest till the United States were strong enough to force an 
evacuation. Gouverneur Morris and the Duke of Leeds had 
been corresponding in London without result. That American 
representative had also intimated to Pitt that the real reason 
of the delay was the fur trade, and tliat the depriving American 
merchants of that trade had prevented the profits which might 
have liquidated the British debts. It was true that some of the 
States were unconverted to Jay's views. In Georgia, British 
debts were still confiscated. In Virginia, there were strong- 
legal and social combinations against the creditors, and Mar- 
shall and Henry were active in the debtors' behalf. 

On the British side there was the strong support of the Ca- 
nadian fur traders, who lost no opportunity of pressing their 
interests upon the government. One of these, who described 
himself as an " Indian intei-]n'eter and trader," Long by name, 
had just published (1791) his Voyages and Travels, and in it 
he said : " It is an undoubted fact that, in case of a dispute 



416 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

with the Americans, the posts woukl make but a feeble resist- 
ance " without the aid of the Six Nations, " and, deprived of the 
posts, the fur trade woukl surely be lost to this country," and 
he contended for " the propriety of keeping " tkem. At times 
these traders feared that the course of diplomacy might restore 
the posts. They were always ready under such apprehensions 
to press for an interval of five years in which to collect and 
withdraw their proj^erty. The offense to the Americans was 
not only that the posts on the territory which had been won by 
treaty were used in this lucrative traffic, but that the British 
traders, as St. Clair represented to his government, presumed 
to traverse territory not within the influence of these posts in 
pursuit of this same trade. The Great Northern Company of 
Canada had, through Todd & Company, secured from Caron- 
delet permission to trade on the western bank.of the Mississippi 
in its uj^per parts, though it seems probable that the Spanish 
governor had no conception with whom he was dealing in con- 
ferring this privilege. The result was tliat British traders 
passed to and fro, preferably by the Wisconsin as the shorter 
route, but also by the Chicago portage, and in both cases across 
American soil in reaching these trans-Mississippi regions to 
which the post at Prairie du Chien was the usual portal. It 
was pointed out at the time how Vigo, the old abettor of George 
Rogers Clark, in making his trips between St. Louis and Pitts- 
burg, had shown that the river route was much cheaper than 
the lake route was by way of these portages. It was indicated 
how profitable the Americans might make the business if they 
could get possession of it. They were at present forced to con- 
duct a faint rivali-y from Vincennes. 

There is no question that an Indian war was detrimental to 
the British trading interests by diminishing the supply of skins. 
There was, accordingly, little to be gained in bankrupting the 
merchants of Detroit and Mackinac by an official incitement 
to war. Yet it was, on the other hand, conceived to be for the 
advantage of the British government to divert American at- 
tention from any attempt to assail the posts by keeping it 
occupied with movements of the savages, and so to threaten a 
war, if not actually provoking an outbreak. It was a dangerous 
policy and likely to get beyond control. 

It had been very apparent towards the end of 1789 that war. 



ALARMS. 417 

was coining, and Washington had instructed St. Clair to be 
prepared by summoning a thousand militia from Virginia and 
five hundred from Pennsylvania. There were at this time a 
few fortified posts in the northwest, — Fort Knox at Vincennes, 
Fort Washington at Cincinnati, Fort Steuben, twenty-two miles 
above Wheeling, and Fort Harmar. Not one of them had 
more than a few score defenders. 

Early in the year (1790), while St. Clair was on the lower 
Ohio, he had instructed Hamtrarack, commanding at Vin- 
cennes, to try to propitiate the Indians neighboring to that 
post ; but the effort failed there, as it did elsewhere along the 
Ohio valley. During the spring of 1790, there were alarms all 
the way from Pittsburg to the Mississippi. Boats were con- 
stantly intercepted on the Ohio, and mostly near the mouth of 
the Scioto. There was here on the Kentucky side a high rock, 
which served the Indians as a lookout, whence they could scan 
the river up and down. Harmar, in April, 1790, had sent a 
force to strike the Scioto some distance up, and swoop down 
upon this nest of marauders, but it had little effect. The 
stories of this wild foraging carried dismay far and wide. 
Zeisberger, at the Moravian station of New Salem, — then on 
the traveled route between Pittsburg and Detroit, — heard 
of the ravages in April, and ascribed this murderous activity to 
the Cherokees. The stories reached St. Clair at Cahokia on the 
1st of May, 1790, when he wrote to the secretary of war that 
hostilities seemed inevitable. He charged the British author- 
ities with instigating the trouble, and thought it not possible to 
stop the river depredations by patrol boats, inasmuch as the 
trade with New Orleans had drained Kentucky of the provi- 
sions which a patrolling force would requii'e. 

AVhen St. Clair started up the river in June, 1790, he was 
satisfied that the intrigues of Brant had succeeded among the 
Wabash tribes, and that they would conspire with the Miamis 
for a general war. In this frame of mind the governor reached 
Fort Washington on July 13, 1790. Two days later, he made a 
demand on Kentucky for troops, w^ith the determination to take 
the offensive. Judge Innes at the same time wrote to Knox 
that unless something of that kind was done, the Kentuckians 
were " determined to avenge themselves," and the discontent 
was for a while farther increased by a rumor that the govern- 



418 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

nient had determined to abandon the Ohio country. St. Clair's 
activity soon satisfied the distrustful that an effort would at 
least be made to protect the settlements. The governor now 
authorized Richard Butler, commanding in Alleghany County, 
to summon the militia of the nearest counties in Pennsylvania 
and Virginia to protect that region, and distract the Indians 
thereabouts, while Harmar was advancing up the Miami in a 
campaign which had been decided upon. On August 23, 1790, 
St. Clair reported his plans to Knox, and told him that Ham- 
tramck had at the same time been instructed to advance on the 
side of the Wabash. Harmar's force was ordered to assemble 
at Fort Washington on September 15. As this day approached, 
it was evident that delays would occur, for Governor Mifflin of 
Pennsylvania was sluggish in sending forward his quota. Knox, 
meanwhile, was suggesting to St. Clair to keep in mind the 
founding of a fort on the upper Miami with a garrison of seven 
hundred and fifty men, and to support it by auxiliary posts 
on the Scioto and Maumee. The difficulty which confronted 
Knox was that eighteen hundred men would be necessary to 
carry the plan fully out and maintain communications, while 
the government had no more than four hundred regulars to 
spare for the object. He anxiously asked St. Clair if his 
militia could be depended upon to supply the rest. 

There was, at the same time, a division among Washington's 
advisers on the question of assuring the English commander at 
Detroit that Harmar's movements were not directed against 
that post. Jefferson feared that if Dorchester's anxiety in that 
respect was quieted, he would be freer to prepare to attack the 
Spaniards on the Mississippi, in the impending war with Spain, 
though it was possible without such a notice he might suspect 
the sudden armament was intended to contest his passage across 
American territory to reach the Mississippi. The final result 
of weighing opinions was that St. Clair was instructed to com- 
municate with the British at Detroit, and on September 19 he 
sent such a letter from Marietta, in which he expressed a hope 
that the English ti'aders might be restrained from giving aid 
to the Indians. 

The English had already been making up their minds, as 
Dorchester had written in March to Grenville, that the posts 
were really the object of the American campaign, no matter 



HARMAR'S CAMPAIGN. 419 

what their profession. The Canadian governor thought, as his 
letters show, that it was the American phm to advance hy 
the Potomac to the Ohio, and then proceed against Erie and 
Detroit. "The possession, also," he added, "of the great ap- 
proaclies to Canada by the Mohawk and Oswego and u}) the 
Sorel would make them masters of the country." He urged 
the sending to Canada of four thousand more soldiers, for 
though he could repair and strengthen the upper posts against 
an Indian attack, Niagara was the only one which could Ye\w\ 
the Americans, As the summer came on and brought the 
danger of a Spanish war, there was a disposition in London 
to think Dorcliester's prognostications reasonable, particularly 
when the minister learned from him that Congress had voted 
to raise five thousand foot and sixteen companies of artillery 
to reinforce the western army, though the Senate had indeed 
reduced the number to three thousand infantry. This made 
matters look serious to the British ministry, — the game was 
becoming hazardous, — and in August Dorchester was advised 
to prevent the Indians ravaging the American settlements, for 
" if the United States send an army against the Indians, embar- 
rassments will follow." Dorchester, in further advices, repre- 
sented St. Clair as a man of firmness and experience, but of no 
great ability, while Ilarmar was frequently intoxicated. 

So under this drunken leader, as British rumor had it, the 
little army was gathering at Fort Washington. The militia did 
not ])romise well, with their bad equipments, and there were 
also signs of insubordination. By October 1, Ilarmar sent for- 
ward an advance guard to open the road. Three days later, 
the genei'al followed with his main body. His whole force 
consisted of three hundred and twenty regulars and one tliou- 
sand one hundred and thirty-three militia. The rumor tliat 
had gone nortli gave liim a much larger army, and McKee had 
notified Sir John Johnson that the Indians could not stand 
before it. It was reported to Zeisberger that the numbers were 
eight thousand, and the smallest reckoning they had at Detroit 
gave him two thousand. The result was that the Indians no- 
where made a stand, and Ilarmar, in sixteen days, reached the 
Miami and Delaware villages, near where the St. Mary's and 
St. Joseph's rivers unite to form the Manmee. Here he found 
their three hundred huts deserted, and the storehouses of the 



420 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

Detroit traders bai-ed of their goods, which the Indians had 
assisted in carrying away. He however found twenty thousand 
bushels of corn, which, with the huts, he burned. 

Thus far, Harmar had accomplished what in Indian warfare 
was often thought to count for something, and this mere de- 
struction was the ground of St. Clair's claim that the expedition 
was successful in delivering a '' terrible stroke " to the enemy. 
Hamtramek, who had the same sort of success in his movement 
farther west, knew better the significance of such easy warfare, 
" The Indians can never be subdued by burning their houses 
and corn," he said, ''for they make themselves perfectly com- 
fortable on meat alone, and they can build houses with as much 
facility as a bird does his nest." 

If his devastations did not count for all he wished, Harmar's 
later blunders really negatived his doubtful achievements. His 
troops were, on the whole, but unpromising soldiers, many too 
old for campaigning and more too young, and he heedlessly 
committed them to work which only the best disciplined men 
could do. He sent out, beyond support, three several detach- 
ments, and gave Little Turtle, with better knowledge of the 
numbers he now had to deal with, a chance to overwhelm them 
in detail, and a loss of one hundred and eighty was speedily 
inflicted. The main body saw no foe, but after November 4, 
when they began their disorderly retreat, it might have suf- 
fered as much as the flanking parties, had the Ottawas not 
withdrawn from the savage horde. As it was, Harmar took 
back a larger part of his force than could have been expected, 
to winter them in scattered posts along the river, so as to pre- 
vent the ravages of famine. 

McKee, on the British side, professed to look upon the fight- 
ing which had taken place as a victory, and as a trial of arms 
it undoubtedly was ; but such partial success did not quiet his 
apprehensions, and he promptly apjiealed to Sir John Johnson 
for aid, if the tribes were to be held together east of the Missis- 
sippi, This indicates a considerable extremity on the enemy's 
side. Had Knox's advice been followed, and a stockade built 
on the Miami, Harmar might have saved the men which he 
heedlessly exposed, and have gained a vantage-ground for a 
treaty. The obstacles to the permanence of a reconcilement 
with the Indians were, however, as yet great, and Hamtramek 



INDIAN MARAUDING. 421 

did not exaggerate the risks when he said to St. Clair, in 
December, 1790 : •' The people of our frontiers will certainly 
be the first to break any treaty. The people of Kentucky will 
carry on private expeditions and kill Indians wherever they 
meet them, and I do not believe there is a jviry in all Kentucky 
who would pnnisli a man for it," — an opinion that Washing- 
ton himself certainly shared, when he affirmed, that the " fron- 
tier settlers entertain the opinion that there is not the same 
crime (or indeed no crime at all^ in killing an Indian as in 
killing a white man." 

The Indians, when they counted losses and gains in the late 
campaign, showed no signs of distrust of their ability to press 
their adversaries still harder. They apparently got encourage- 
ment from their allied whites, and McKee, whom St. Clair 
charo;ed. with furnishino- ammunition to the bands which at- 
tacked Harmar's detached parties, was, with Simon Girty's sup- 
port, hot for further fighting. So it was decided to renew 
mai-auding in December, 1790. 

The first attack came on the evening of January 2, 1791, 
when a body of Delawares and Wyandots dashed upon a small 
settlement at Big Bottom, dependent upon Marietta, but forty 
miles up the Muskingum. Here they killed twelve persons, 
and leaving their mangled bodies on the ground they suddenly 
withdrew, carrying off four prisoners. The sad tidings reached 
Marietta the next morning, and Putnam began to call in the 
settlers and make ready for warm work. There were twenty 
regulars in Fort Harmar, and the settlements within reach covdd 
muster about three hundred men, Belpre, twelve miles down 
the Ohio, had not yet been alarmed, but hovering parties of 
Indians were seen the same day about Watei'ford, at Wolf 
Creek. 

The next warning came on the 10th, at Dunlap Station, on 
the east bank of the Miami, when Girty ai)peared with three 
hundred warriors. The inhabitants had been advised of their 
approach, and summoned aid from Cincinnati. Just as it 
arrived, the enemy withdrew. During February, 1791, the 
settlements along the Alleghany suffered severely, and by 
IVIarch fleets of Indian canoes w'ere assailing flatboats along 
the Ohio. It was just at this time that Nathaniel Massie, 



422 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

who, as a surveyor of bounty lands, had picked out a site on 
the north bank of the river, twelve miles above Limestone, 
was laying in stockade and blockhouse the foundations of the 
later Manchester, the pioneer Virginia settlement on that side 
of the river. 

Meanwhile, both at Quebec and Philadelphia, the authorities 
were intent on militai'y preparations. Dorchester, fearing that 
Harniar's advance was but preliminary to an attack on Detroit, 
issued orders in January, 1791, to the westei-n commanders to 
be alert and promptly confront the Americans if they ap- 
proached. At the same time, Washington notified Congress, in 
December, 1790, that he intended another expedition at the 
west, and laid before Congress a plan for raising three thousand 
troops, to be placed under St. Clair for active work. When 
Congress had approved, Knox asked Pickering to accept the 
position of quartermaster of a western department, and push 
the details, but he declined. In doing so, however, he expressed 
his conviction that the tribes could be taught to respect the 
reserved power of the Kepublic. Washington, buoyed in his 
hopes by the restoration of the public credit, and depending 
on the increasing resources of the country, felt equally sure that 
the Indians could be made to understand that the " enmity of 
the United States is as much to be dreaded as their friendship 
is to be desired." Jefferson had scant sympathy with any mili- 
tary measures, and wrote to Monroe : "• I hope we shall drub 
the Indians well this summer, and then change our plan from 
war to bribery," for the expenses of a summer's campaign will 
buy " presents for half a century." 

While the government was thus over-confident, Knox, on 
March 9, 1791, issued orders to General Charles Scott of Ken- 
tucky to move suddenly against the Kickapoos and other 
Wabash tribes, to prevent their joining the Miamis, against 
whom the main attack was to be made. It was equally desii-a- 
ble that similar or other methods should at the east distract 
the Indians of New York, and keep them at least neutral. To 
this end, Pickering was asked to put himself in communication 
with Brant, while Governor Clinton was urged to win over that 

Note, — The map on the opposite page, sliowing by the black dots Moravian settlements, is 
from G. H. Loskiel's Mission 0/ the United Brethren, London, 1794. 



424 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

Mohawk chief by a gift, for he was known to have informed 
Kirkland, the missionary among his people, that he had deter- 
mined to head a western confederacy in forcing the Americans 
south and east of the Ohio. These measures were at once 
seized upon by the British to jirove to the Indians that the 
professions of jjeace on the part of the Americans were insin- 
cere. Brant was known, in May, 1791, to have gone west with 
a following, but with wdiat intent was not knowai. On June 4, 
1791, however, he wrote back to Sir John Johnson that he had 
decided to join in the coming fight. He had probably heard 
by this time that Scott had, on May 19, crossed the Ohio with 
eight hundred mounted Kentuckians, and was advancing on the 
Wabash towns. Scott's coming had been heralded, and when 
he reached their towns, one hundred and fifty miles away, he 
found them deserted, and so encountered no serious opposition 
in burning them. He killed a score or two of Indians, and cap- 
tured a somewhat larger number. When, retreating, he reached 
the rapids at Louisville, he had been absent about thirty days. 
There could be no peace after this. In June, 1791, while 
Knox, in Philadelphia, was confident that war was begun, the 
Indians were gathering in large numbers. Zeisberger, then at 
the mouth of the Detroit River, was informed that four thou- 
sand had assembled, and he was made anxious lest his peaceful 
Moravian converts woidd be forced to join them. 

It is not easy to determine how to apportion the responsi- 
bility of the savage war to which the Americans now seemed 
to be committed. The tribes had a standing grievance against 
the Americans in the treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1784, and yet 
Washington pointed out to Cornplanter, who with other Seneca 
chiefs had come to Philadelphia in December, 1790, that the 
very release of lands, of which they complained, had been 
confirmetl by them in the treaty of Fort Harmar in 1789. 
" Therefore the lines must remain established," said the Presi- 
dent. Cornplanter had, during this conference, urged that cer- 
tain lands should be restored ; but Washington, taught by the 
claims which the Indians presented that the treaty of 1784 
had been made by irresponsible chiefs, readily suspected that 
any yielding now to the Senecas would encourage similar de- 
mands from other factions of the tribes. There was indeed 
just now a new grievance, in that Robert Morris had bought 



COUNTER RAIDS. 425 

for ,^100,000 the rights of Gorham and Phelps to the lands 
sold by Massachusetts in western New York, and Washing- 
ton had already looked forward to trouble about the Indian 
title, and was not unprepared for Cornplanter's accusation of 
fraud. Indeed, as Washington said to Hamilton, " land-jobbing 
and the disorderly conduct of the borderers " were a constant 
source of irritation to the tribes ; and to these were added the 
complications which came of individual States interfering in 
matters which belonged to the general government. The Ken- 
tuckians raided of their ow^n account the Wabash region ; the 
Tennesseeans encroached upon lands at the Muscle Shoals ; 
and New York had just in her Assembly voted to buy innnu- 
nity fi'om hostile depredations, thereby damaging the prestige 
of the federal authorities. So the evils which incited the sav- 
ages to hostilities were not unaccompanied by uncontrollable 
mischief to the Republic itself from similar sources. 

On the British side the story was not altogether a satisfac- 
tory one to the tribes, who were slow in forgetting that the 
treaty of 1782 had been concluded by the English without any 
recognition of their rights to ancestral lands, and that the 
promises of aid, which had been implied perhaps rather than 
actually promised, had rarely been fulfilled. 

While Dorchester, in his communications with the Americans, 
professed to desire peace, and the fur merchants deprecated 
war, neither contemplated wath satisfaction any success for the 
Americans which woidd hazard the British possession of the 
posts, or lead to the establishment of other lake stations, which 
w^ould admit the Americans to the navigation of the lakes and 
affect the profits of the older posts. In these conditions, the 
movements of the Indians were watched with anxiety, and 
the encouragement given to them to worry the Americans, by 
such intriguers as Girty and McKee, was likely at any time 
to compromise the public peaceful professions of those in 
unmistakable authority. Harmar's report indicated that if 
he had chanced to capture the traders at the villages which he 
destroyed, there might have been complications which would 
force Dorchester to retaliation, and bring on a war. Dorchester 
himself perceived this, and wdth some apprehension he asked 
Sir John Johnson to discover the terms on which peace could 
be arransed between the Indians and the Americans. 



426 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

But, inopportunely, it was just upon the eve of political 
cliauge in Canada, which was to bring a new character to bear 
upon the overstrained relations of the two countries. In Sep- 
tember, Dorchester was informed of the constitutional act of 
March, which had set up, as distinct from Lower Canada, the 
region west of the Ottawa, with ten thousand population, as a 
new government, grateful to the loyalists, and preserving such 
features of the Quebec Act as were not inconsistent, and placing 
in command John Graves Simcoe, whom the Americans had 
learned to hate in the Revolutionary War. He probably soon 
heard of the proposition of McKee to reestablish the disused 
fort at the foot of the Maumee rapids as a necessary outpost 
of Detroit, though he was not yet prepared to undertake it. 

From early spring, St. Clair had been preparing for his own 
work, hoping to get at it before autumn. In April, 1791, he 
reached Pittsburg, and endeavored to prevail upon the Sene- 
cas to join his army. A few days later, at Fort Harmar, he 
warned the Delawares that they must abide the consequences, 
if they interposed themselves between him and the Miamis ; 
and it was probably about this time that he sent forward to 
the Miamis a speech which McKee said was intended to distract 
their councils. 

By the middle of May, St. Clair was at Fort Washington, 
where his little army was to gather. Symmes, who looked in 
on the raw levies arrived from the seaboard towns, wrote to 
Elias Boudinot that " men who are to be purchased from 
prisons, wheelbarrows, and brothels at two dollars per month 
will never answer for fiohtina' Indians." Such a force was not 
an inspiring one for a man like St. Clair, no longer young, sub- 
ject to intervals of illness, and not as alert as he once was. If 
the men were poor and came slowly to the rendezvous, the mate- 
rial for supplies had passed no adequate inspection in being- 
sent forward. The powder was bad. The saddles did not fit 
the horses. The oxen were poor and insufficient in number. 
With such things to worry him, St. Clair waited from June to 
September. 

In August, fearful lest the Wabash Indians might have re- 
covered from the effects of Scott's raid amono' them, and misrht 
gather with the other tribes athwart his route, which had been 



WILKINSON'S RAID. 427 

too plainly indicated for the advance, he dispatched another 
force, as Knox had counseled, to repeat the blow. A body of 
mounted Kentuckians, five hundred and fifty strong, reported 
for this service at Fort Washington in eTuly. Wilkinson, who 
had found Spanish intrigue getting tiresome, had sold his 
Frankfort property and accepted the command of these ardent 
volunteers. His enemies said it was a plan of the government 
to profit by his restless energy and divert it from mischievous 
action at home. On July 31, St. Clair gave him his instruc- 
tions, and the next day he led his clanking horsemen out into 
the wilderness. The direction which he took seemed towards 
the Miami towns, and on this course he traveled four days and 
sixty miles, and then turned to the northwest. Passing now a 
broken country full of swamps, he fell upon Ouiatanon and 
other villages of Indians, with French traders among them, and 
devastated their cabins. His horses were badly used uj), and 
but five days' provisions remained. He accordingly marched 
towartls the Ohio rapids, as Scott had done, and reached them 
on August 21. Proceeding thence to Frankfort, three days 
later, he dispatched his report to St. Clair. When Washing- 
ton heard of the results he said that the " enterprise, intrepidity, 
and good conduct of the Kentuckians were entitled to peculiar 
connnendation." 

The tidings of Wilkinson's success found St. Clair in deep 
anxiety. Every messenger from the east had brought urgent 
appeals for his advancing before the season was past for success- 
ful campaigning. His want of supplies, however, still detained 
him. He had now two regiments of regulars and some Ken- 
tucky militia, whom he might reasonably trust ; but the boats 
from Pittsburg still brought him the wretched scourings of the 
eastern towns, towards completing the " two thousand levies 
for the term of six months " which Congress had ordered. 

St. Clair's instructions, as often as he read them, gave him 
disquiet, in the presence of such recruits. He was to establish 
a " strong and permanent militai'y post at the ]\Iiami village 
. . . for the purpose of awing and curbing the Indians, and as 
the only preventive of future hostilities," and he was to main- 
tain such a garrison in it that he could upon occasion detach five 
or six hundi-ed men on special service. He was warned in his 
instructions that such a post was " an important object of the 



428 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

campaign," and to be founded in any event, and to be supplied 
with a six months' stock of provisions. It was left to liis dis- 
cretion whether he should employ Indians. In making a treaty 
at last, he was told to insist on keeping the tribes beyond the 
AV abash and Maumee, and, if he could, to divert the line to the 
Mississippi from the Au Pause branch of the Wabash. This 
would give a good stretch of country along the Ohio to the 
Americans, and dispossess few Indians beyond the Kickapoos. 
If this was insisted on, he was warned to manage it " tenderly." 
Still more cautiously must he treat the English, and it was 
held to be improper at present to " make any naval arrange- 
ments upon Lake Erie." 

All this was the expectation of the government and the not 
over-confident hope of St. Clair. The plan had required three 
thousand effectives to be ready at Foi't Washington by July 
10, 1791 ; but the first regiment of two hundred and ninety- 
nine men did not arrive till the 15th. It was October before 
the general could count two thousand men, exclusive of the 
militia and the garrisons of Forts Washington and Hamilton, 
— the latter stockade having been begun on September 17, 
on the Great Miami. From this point, on October 4, General 
Butler, whose appointment had not been wholly acceptable, 
started with the advance, lumbering slowly on with his trains, 
five or six miles a day, through a bad country. On the 13th, 
the army stopped, and was occupied till the 24th in build- 
ing a stockade, which he called Fort Jefferson, intended to 
shield his sick and hold his surplus supplies. The country 
about it was fertile, but it was too late in the year for his 
animals to get much refreshment out of it. When he started 
again, on the 28th, he soon discovered that the Indians were 
hanging on his flanks. There had been some desertions, and 
to check them he had executed one or two who had been re- 
taken ; but on October 31, a considerable body of militia slunk 
away, and St. Clair sent Major Hamtramck back with one of 
his regiments of regulars to prevent their robbing his supply 
trains. St. Clair had days of almost physical incapacity for 
his task, and General Butler, who was next in command, was 
scarcely better in health. The discipline and steadiness of the 
march would have suffered irretrievably, but for the exertions 
of the adjutant-genei-al, Winthrop Sargent. It was Washing- 



ST. CLAIR'S DEFEAT. 429 

ton's criticism, when the miserable outcome was known, that 
there had lieen insufficient efforts to get information of the 
enemy, and that St. Clair's scouting system was inadequate. 
It is certain that the enemy was not long in discovering that 
St. Clair's scouts were not numerous, to say the least. He had 
been pointedly cautioned to be on his guard against surprise ; 
and yet when he went into his last camp on November 3, on a 
branch of the Wabash, with a benumbing wind sweeping over 
icy ground, he was in the immediate neighborhood of his enemy, 
and with no chance of suddenly forming his line in case of an 
unexpected irruption. So it was not to be wondered at that, 
early on the morning of the 4th, some militia which he had 
bivouacked in advance beyond the stream, and too remote for 
instant support, were broken in upon and thrown into a panic. 
They fell hastily back upon the rest of the army. While he 
was endeavoring to form his lines within his camp, which was 
three hundred and fifty yards in length, the enemy swung around 
it, and when St. Clair found that his position was completely en- 
veloped, he grew to a concejition of the extent of the force which 
was opposed to him, though Armstrong, an old Indian fighter, 
was sure that five hundred savages, invisible as their habit 
was, could have produced all that St. Clair saw. The assail- 
ants from a tliick cover poured a deadly fire upon the huddled 
and unprotected troops. St. Clair, with his gray hair stream- 
ing under his cocked hat, had horse after horse shot under 
him as he endeavored to make his force stand steady amid the 
frightful carnage. He had eight bullets pierce his garments, 
but not one gTazed his skin. Butler was soon mortally wounded. 
The few guns of the Americans were rendered useless, when 
not a cannoneer could stand to them. The regulars lost every 
officer. The frenzied men, gaining manhood under the trial, 
tried to charge this way and that. The retreat of the Indians 
lured them on, when the wily savages would turn and surround 
them, party after party. Finally, there being no hope, the guns 
were spiked, and St. Clair gathered his men for a last charge 
to regain the road of retreat. He secured it ; and for four 
miles the Indian fire blazed upon the flanks and in the rear. 
At last, over-eager for the spoils, dusky warriors drew off and 
began plundering what had been left behind. This saved 
the army from annihilation ; but it did not prevent the men 



430 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

throwing away their muskets, and St. Clair, near the rear of 
the line, found the ground covered with these rejected weapons 
as he passed along. He coni})lained that the horse he rode 
" could not be pricked out of a walk,"' so it was impossible for 
him to ride forward and stop the waste. 

The action began a half hour before sunrise, and the re- 
treat was made at half-past nine. The estimates vary, but it is 
pi"obable that St. Clair had in the fight not more than fourteen 
hundred men, and of these scarce half a hundred were unhurt- 
Very few beyond the killed and desjjerately wounded fell into 
the enemy's hands. 

It is generally recognized that Little Turtle led the Indians. 
There was a small body of Mohawks present, but it is not 
probable that Brant was among them. Stone, his biographer, 
found a belief among the chiefs descendants that he was in the 
fight ; but there is no evidence of a more trustworthy kind. 
The Delawares, who had been stigmatized as women for lack of 
courage in past years, wiped out the disgrace by valiant deeds. 

It was near thirty miles from the battlefield to Fort Jeffer- 
son, and the remnant of the army reached that post before 
night. Here St. Clair found Hamtramck and his command, 
and left about seventy of his wounded. 

On November 9, he sent from Fort Washington a messenger 
with a dispatch, but rumors had already reached the govern- 
ment ten or eleven days earlier, and thirty days after the 
disaster. About the same time the news of the Indian side, 
traveling by the way of Vincennes, reached Frankfort, when it 
stirred Wilkinson's rampant energy, who was ready to strike 
the war-path on the Maumee or " perish in the attempt." 

The Indian question had now become more serious than ever 
before, and there was great danger of tlie disaffection spreading 
among the Six Nations. Pickering, during the sunnner, had 
labored hard to propitiate them ; but lie had encountei^ed the 
adverse influence of Brant. The activity of this chief was sur- 
prising. No sooner was he heard of at the Maumee rapids, 
conferring with the tribes, than lie was i^epoi-ted at Niagara, in 
council with the British commander. His messengers, in the 
interim, were plying back and forth. All the while, as the let- 
ters now published show, warnings were coming from England, 



JEFFERSON AND HAMMOND. 431 

and passed on to the upper posts, to prevent an outbreak. 
Perhaps the cabinet in London little knew how renegade mis- 
chief-makers were assuming among the Miamis to represent 
British jDurposes to aid them in a war, and the Canadian 
officials were constantly a})prehending an attack on the posts, 
though Beckwith was writing to them from Philadelphia that 
the federal government disclaimed any such intention. 

Before the news of St. Clair's defeat had reached Philadel- 
phia, Jefferson and Hammond, the newly arrived British min- 
ister, had begun their bootless conferences. It was not long 
before it was apparent that Hammond had come merely to talk 
and keep watch. The two representatives were hopelessly at 
variance. They opposed each other on every aspect of the 
treaty of 1782. Hammond said that interest on the British 
debts constituted a part of the obligation. Jefferson denied it. 
Plammond represented and Jefferson disputed that the Ameri- 
cans had first broken the treaty. This kind of disputatious 
fence was going on, when the news of St. Clair's defeat put a 
stop to it, and the American cabinet gave itself to other mat- 
ters. Of course it was necessary to find a scapegoat for the ill 
luck at the west. The secretary of war was accused of neg- 
lect. The quai'termaster had not done his duty. St. Clair had 
proved a failure. The news from the New England States 
showed that that section of the country at least was tired of the 
war. They believed with Pickering that pacifying the Indians 
cost less than killing them. The old problem of the respon- 
sibility of the British for aiding the savages came up again. 
Hammond promptly denied any complicity in his countrymen. 
It was a question whether a schedule of evidences, refuting 
Hammond's asseverations, should not be given to Thomas 
Pinckney, who was just starting for England. Certain acts 
were acknowledged by Hammond, but defended on the ground 
of charitable giving of food to famishing beings. Again, it was 
confessed guns and powder had been given, but it was a neces- 
sity of the Indian hunting season, while the Americans claimed 
that such gifts in times of peace were quite another thing when 
given in time of war, and they became a breach of neutrality. 
It did not make a bad matter better if, as the Americans con- 
tended, McKee scattered the munitions of war with his hands 
and talked peace as he did it. Nor was it less to be resented in 



432 HARMAR'S AND ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGNS. 

Sir John Johnson doing the same thing statedly at the mouth 
of the Niagara. 

The fact was, it was extremely difficult for the British gov- 
ernment to treat the Indians as wards and administer to their 
needs, and not transgress the limits of neutrality as the Ameri- 
cans understood it. It was further, no doubt, true that friendly 
phrases uttered to the Indians by those wearing the British 
uniform were easily conceived to be a promise of help, by those 
anxious to receive it. As rejjorts spread west, it was easy for 
the remoter tribes, especially if prompted to it, to imagine that 
to espouse the quarrel of the nearer people was the way to put 
oft" their own sacrifices to the whites. Rufus Putnam informed 
Knox that the Chippeways inclined to be neutral, but were 
played upon in this way till they embraced the cause of the 
Miamis. 

When it came to the question of bounds between the Indians 
and the Americans, there is no doubt the English were pre- 
pared to do what could be done, without actually imperiling 
the peace, to advance the demands of the tribes, and even to 
demand larger sacrifices from the Republic. They talked much 
about the desirability of a territorial barrier to keep the reck- 
less Americans and the heedless Britons apart. Some of the 
maps issued in London assumed this barrier as a part of the 
political geography of North America. It was Jefferson's opin- 
ion, from what Hammond had said, that the British government 
wanted a new line run, which should leave Lake Ontario by the 
Genesee, thence follow the Alleghany to Pittsburg, and so west 
in some way to the Mississippi. This would provide a barrier 
country and open the Mississippi to British access. If not this, 
their purpose was to gain that river by running the line from 
the Lake of the Woods to its sources, instead of due west to 
that river, which the treaty required, and which had proved a 
geographical impossibility. Perhaps a line even better for 
England could be secured, as Hammond sometimes claimed, by 
starting the westward line at Lake Superior instead. Some 
of the current maps of the English give this line as stax'ting 
from the westernmost point of Lake Superior. Jefferson, on 
his side, claimed that the error of the treaty was remedied 
more simply by running the line due north from the sources 



THE INDIAN LINE. 433 

of the Mississii3pi, and that the right of England to share in 
the navigation of the Mississippi was inserted in the treaty 
merely to meet the contingency of Spain's yielding west Florida 
to England, in the general treaty made seven weeks later. 
Thns broadly were the British scanning the possibilities of a 
rectification of the Repnblic's northern boundary. 

The Indian demand gave the tribes all the country north of 
the Ohio and west of the Muskingum and the Cayahoga. 
They claimed on every occasion that they had never parted 
with an acre of this territory by any fair treaty. The Ameri- 
cans cited the treaty of Fort Harmar, insisted it was not a 
fraudulent compact, and, as lands had been granted under it, 
the grantees must be protected. The British said that in any 
event the Americans had, by the treaty of 1782, only the right 
of preemption to any lands south of the lakes which had not 
been bought of the tribes prior to 1782 ; and that the treaty 
gave the Indians the right to decline to sell, if they would. 
This view was a common one in the English maps, which ran 
the bounds of the United States along the Alleghanies. There 
is little doubt the Indians were taught sedulously this view 
of the treaty, for it protected the posts and perpetuated the 
British fur trade. It would seem that to sustain this view the 
new act creating Upper Canada had studiously avoided giving 
any bounds. This view also served the British in appeasing 
the savage discontent at the cruel way in which the interests 
of the Indians were abandoned by the British commissioners in 
negotiating the treaty. It is clear from the letters of Brant 
and Sir John Johnson that they understood the matter in the 
British way. 

It was evident, then, that the combined interests of the Brit- 
ish and Indians, in such a line by the Ohio, must be overcome 
by composition or force, before the Republic could achieve the 
territorial independence which was thought to be assured to 
her by the treaty of 1782. 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

1792-1794. 

Before the dazing effect of St. Clair's defeat was dispelled, 
Knox had planned a legionary reorganization of the western 
army, on the basis of five thousand men, with a supplemental 
force of militia and scouts. While there was a probable neces- 
sity for such military provision, it was deemed prudent to ascei-- 
tain if the intercession of the Six Nations could not end the 
northwestern difficulty without a further resort to arms. Before 
the close of 1791, Cornplanter, the Seneca leader, had been 
invited to Philadelphia, and Kirkland, the missionary, was 
souofht to use his influence with Brant and the Mohawks to 
induce them to join the council. So pressure was brought to 
bear upon the two extremes of the New York confederates, in 
the hopes to compass the acquiescence of the entire league. On 
January 3, 1792, Kirkland wrote to Brant, urging him to accept 
the invitation, and giving promise of protection, a guarantee 
not altogether unnecessary, for Brant's name was associated 
with some of the most fiendish acts of the Revolution, whose 
effects were not yet forgotten. A month later. Brant declined 
(February 3), and later still (February 25), Knox added a new 
appeal. 

Meanwhile, St. Clair had arrived in New York, ready to face 
the charges against him for his failure." He desired first a 
court-martial, but there were not officers enough available of 
suitable rank. He asked to retain his military commission 
mitil such inquiry as Congress should institute was over. This, 
however, as he was told by Washington, who remained through- 
out kind and considerate, was not practicable, as the law al- 
lowed but a single major-general, and his successor was impera- 
tively needed to proceed to the northwest and take command. 
So, in April, St. Clair was induced to resign. 



DUER AND THE SCIOTO COMPANY. 435 

In February, 1792, Congress was canvassing the chances of a 
new campaign, and there was little heart for it among the east- 
ern members, who never quite comprehended the western spirit. 
Oliver Wolcott was a good rejiresentative of those indifferent 
to the demands of the frontiers, and was quite willing to let 
them fight out their own salvation, and to run the risk of their 
making foreign alliances. "These western people," he said,/ 
" are a violent and unjust race in many respects, unrestrained 
by law and considerations of public policy." Washington was 
not (pxite so sweeping in his belief, l)ut he felt that western 
urgency was very embarrassing. Among those who would make 
the western cause that of the country, there was a division of 
opinion between the desirability of fixed posts for awing the 
tribes, and the propriety of aggressive warfare. Washington 
was decidedly on the side of those who had no confidence in 
merely defensive measures. 

The Indian department, in 1791, had spent $27,000 in sup- 
porting the St. Clair campaign, which was ten times what had 
ever been appropriated before, and there was not a little api)re- 
hension in entering upon another year's warfare, likely to be 
more costly still, to find that in financial aspects the spring of 
1792 was a discouraging one. 

The speculative acts of Duer — and the enemies of Hamilton 
charged that that financial minister's funding policy had opened 
the way to stock-jobbing — had brought him to bankruptcy, to 
add still further to the blackness of the Gallipolis scandal. The 
magnate of the Scioto Company, and one of those eminently 
first people of the land whom Cutler rejoiced in, was now a 
prisoner for debt. For a result, as Pickering wrote, " New York 
was in an uproar, and all business at a stand." Jefferson, with 
a kind of satisfaction at the dilemma of the treasury, wrote, 
on March 16 : " Duer, the king of the alley, is under a kind 
of check. The stock-sellers say he will rise again. The stock- 
buyers count him out, and the credit and fate of the nation 
seem to liang on the desperate throws and plunges of gambling 
scoundrels." Jefferson further affected to believe that tlie 
miseries of the South Sea bubble and the Mississippi scheme 
were as nothing, proportionally, to the di'op in securities which 
was now going on. In the midst of tliis financial crash, Rufus 
Putnam and Cutler appeared in Philadel})hia, seeking from 



436 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

Congress their aid in two respects to prevent the collapse of the 
Ohio Company. They represented that during 1791 and 1792 
they had spent $11,350 in protecting themselves against the 
Indians, and they succeeded in inducing the government to 
assume a part of this. Their other plea touched the impending- 
forfeiture of their lands, for their second payment of $50,000 
was due, and they had nothing with which to pay it. Their 
difficulty came in the main, as they urged, from their additional 
purchase of one million five hundred thousand acres, which they 
asked to be released from, for Colonel Duer and the other " first 
people,"' who had agreed to buy it of them, had not done so, 
and Richard Piatt, their treasurer, was in jail, also, with a 
shortage of $80,000 in his accounts. They asked, also, that the 
charge for land per acre which had been agreed upon should be 
reduced, as the government was offering land at lower rates, 
and they could not compete with it. They made a pitiful plea 
of the consideration they should experience as pioneers, and 
it had its effect. But the poor aliens at Gallipolis grubbed 
on without such consideration. The Indians yelped in their 
ears, they got no letters from home, and it seemed to their mind 
a question whether revolutionary France or the " first people 
of America " were the most to be abhorred. In the spring of 
1792, they began to scatter. Some went to Detroit, others fled 
to Kaskaskia. Those that stayed grew hollow-eyed, nervous, 
and hungry, while Duer relished his prison fare, and Cutler 
talked botany with those he met. 

While such was the unprosperons outlook to the world, the 
President and his little cabinet were, during March, 1792, 
discussing the vexed problems that confronted them. When 
some one raised the question of employing Indians, Washington 
replied that they must be with us, or they would be sure to be 
against us. He would use them as scouts to embarrass the 
enemy's spies, and prevent their getting near enough to our 
troops to learn their numbers and j>urposes. 

When Jefferson proposed to build a fort at Presqu'Isle on 
Lake Erie, — the modern town of Erie, — so as to indicate the 
American right to the navigation of that lake, and interpose 
an obstacle thereby to the communication of the Senecas with 
the western tribes, he opened a question that for two years stood 



PETER POND. 437 

in the way of pacifying Brant. The project was sure at all 
times to arouse a disposition in the British " to repel force by 
force," who looked upon it as fatal to their supremacy in those 
waters. At this moment, Hamilton and Knox objected to it as 
likely to hurry the country into a war with England. Washing- 
ton remarked that the fulfillment of such a plan was best left 
■^ to a time when the United States could devote a large force to 
maintain such a post. Jefferson, in pursuance of his plan, was 
suggesting at the same time to Hammond that the two countries 
could agree upon the naval force which was to be kept on the 
lakes. 

The question came up again a little later, when Rufus Putnam, 
with little regard to available resources, sent in a plan of a line 
of posts, beginning at Big Beaver Creek, on the Ohio, and 
extending to Cayahoga Creek. He had traversed the country, 
and said it was the easiest communication to maintain between 
the Ohio and the lake, fit for a land carriage throughout, except 
where a causeway would have to be built through seven or eight 
miles of swampy land. Such a passage would not, he contended, 
be subject to the interruption at dry seasons which a water-way 
was sure to encounter. At the northerly end of this route, 
where is now the modern Cleveland, lie had planned a strong 
fort and naval rendezvous, as the best point for sending supplies 
by the cheapest way to the Maumee country : " The sooner we 
show ourselves on the shores of Lake Erie, the better," he 
added. Washington easily pushed the plan aside as involving 
a division of the proposed legionary force, wdiich was not likely 
to be more than enough for the main stroke farther west, since 
it was as yet by no means sure that recruits would be found in 
abundance. Beside, it was certainly Washington's opinion that 
defensive posts along a line had but little military effect upon 
such a scattered foe as the Indian tribes. 

We have seen that one Peter Pond liad w^ithin a year or two 
been trying to gain at the same time the favor of both the 
British and Americans. He had still more recently tried to 
reach the west by Niagara, but had been turned back by the 
British. He now appeared in Philadeli)hia, and made some 
startling statements to the government. He assured them that 
all efforts to establish a peace with the Indians would fail unless 
they would accept the mediation of England. He professed to 



438 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

believe that this would have to be accomplished by a joint com- 
mission of three, representing- resjiectively the Indians and the 
two governments, and that when the line of separation was 
determined, tlie British would guarantee its preservation to the 
Indians. Hamilton had little faith in Pond, as he well might 
have, and there was still less trust in his story of the intention 
of the British to settle a thousand families in the Illinois coun- 
try. The idea of British mediation in any way was an ungrate- 
ful one to the cabinet, and they promptly dismissed it in their 
counsels. A little later, Morris, in England, heard a rumor of 
the United States asking England to intercede, and communi- 
cated it to Washington. He replied with something like indig- 
nation that any suggestion of it would be promptly dismissed. 

As the time approached for the coming of the Senecas to 
confer with the President and his advisers, it was decided at 
a cabinet meeting that the Indian embassy " should be well 
treated, but not over-trusted." Red Jacket and his fellows 
reached Philadelphia on March 13, 1792, under the escort of 
Kirkland. It was soon apparent that whatever friendly dispo- 
sition the visitors might manifest, a prevalence of it among 
the tribes at home could not be depended upon. Red Jacket, 
in accounting for this widespread distrust among his people, 
charged it upon the fact that the Six Nations were not asked 
to have any hand in the treaty of separation in 1782. He 
further told Pickering, who conducted most of the conferences 
with them, that the western Indians did not understand how the 
British and the Americans, " important and proud as they both 
were," having made a treaty, did not abide by it. Pickering 
said that the Miami and Wabash Indians had always been 
averse to a treaty, while the treaties entered upon with the other 
tribes were fairly made on both sides, and had been justly 
kept. The United States having thus acquired lands and made 
grants of them, they were under the necessity of protecting 
the grantees. It was said in reply that the agreement at Fort 
Mcintosh was not a fair one, as those who represented the In- 
dians were not authorized. Further, there had been a studied 
purpose to exclude the Six Nations from these western treaties. 
This was. Red Jacket affirmed, another cause of their grievance. 

As was usual in such conferences, both sides uttered their 
beliefs, and that was about all, except, after Washington had, 



ANTHONY WAYNE. 439 

on April 25, made them a farewell speech, they had a last 
session on April 30, 1792, and departed with the i)roniise to 
send a deputation to the western tribes. Brant, as we have 
seen, had declined to join in the deliberations, but, on May 27, 
he wrote to Knox that if later he found the Mianiis approved 
it, he would consider the invitation afresh. 
^ While these interviews with the Senecas were going on, 
Washington had been running over the names of officers, 
experienced in the late war, to find a successor to St. Clair. 
His first choice was Henry Lee of Virginia, and this gentleman 
desired the appointment ; but he was the junior in rank to 
those whom Washington wished to make his brigadiers, and 
the appointment was passed by in avoidance of resulting jeal- 
ousies and refusals. Washington confessed he had never been 
so embarrassed in making any appointments. AVhen the mat- 
ter was discussed in the cabinet, Jeftersou records that the 
President looked upon Wayne as "" brave and nothing else." 
Washington's studied and written estimate of Wayne, at this 
time, is fortunately preserved. He considered him '" more 
active and enterprising than judicious and cautious. No econo- 
mist it is feared. Open to flattery, vain ; easily imposed upon 
and liable to be drawn into scrapes." Such a character — and 
there is no doiibt that such was a prevalent opinion of " Mad 
Anthony " — did not indeed promise well for the critical junc- 
tion at the northwest, with England, if not in open, at least in 
equivocal relations with the enemy. Lee, when he heard of 
the result, expressed to the President his surprise, and told him 
the appointment had, in Virginia, created disgust. The choice 
was, in fact, not a little influenced by the restrictions of mili- 
tary etiquette and the necessity of harmonizing interests and 
securing good lieutenants. So in reply to Lee, Washington 
not so much vindicated his selection, as apologized for it. 
'• W^ayne," he wrote, " has many good points as an officer, and 
it is to be hoped that time, reflection, good advice, and above 
all a due sense of the importance of the trust will correct his 
foibles, or cast a shade over them." It grew apparent in the 
next few months that Washington was not without anxiety 
lest results should reflect on his sagacity, and he kept Knox 
promptly to the task of cautioning the new commander. 

The appointment naturally caused the English some solici- 



440 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

tucle, considering how easily an Indian war could induce in- 
advertences that might jeof»ardize the relations of the two 
peoples. Hammond wrote of the new leader that he was " the 
most active, vigilant, and enterprising officer in the American 
army, but his talents are purely military," and he felt, as he 
wrote to Simcoe, that Wayne might be tempted to attack the 
British posts, since success in such an act would be sure to 
make him the successor of Washington. 

The selection of Wilkinson as the first of the four brigadiers 
was a bolder step, perhaps, than the choice of Wayne. When 
last heard from he had gone with one hundred and fifty 
mounted Kentucky volunteers to bury the mutilated dead on 
St. Clair's bloody field, and the act was one of the daring sort 
to which Wilkinson was quite equal. Washington, in discuss- 
ing him in the cabinet, had evidently recalled his dubious career 
in Kentucky, for Jefferson's summary of the talk makes the 
President call him "• brave, enterprising to excess ; but many 
unapprovable points in his character." His written estimate 
avoids this shadow, when he calls Wilkinson " lively, sensible, 
pomjjous, and ambitious." 

There had been an attempt to give the same rank to Colonel 
Marinus Willet, an officer of large experience in forest warfare, 
for he had been with Sullivan and had opposed St. Leger. He, 
however, shared the doubt of many northern men — being a 
New Yorker — of the advisability of an Indian war, and refused 
the appointment. In doing so, he gave an opinion that he had 
never known it to fail of success, when the Indians were 
attacked in a charge, with shouts louder than their own yell. 
Wayne wisely profited, as we shall see, by this veteran's ex- 
perience. 

Meanwhile, to bring the British minister to some distinct 
expression of opinion as regards the posts, Jefferson on May 
29, 1792, intimated to that gentleman that, while in managing 
with the state governments so complicated a matter as the 
recovery of the British debts some time must necessarily be 
consumed, it was a very short business for England to set 
things right on her side by surrendering the posts, which, as he 
said in one of his letters, was occasioning daily cost of " blood 
and treasure " to the United States. The story of the initial 
infraction of the treaty, whether it was to be charged to Eng. 



RUFUS PUTNAM. 441 

land or to the States, had become stale, but Jefferson rehearsed 
it. Hamilton, reverting to the debts, admitted that they were 
now only a question south of the Potomac, and that there 
were X2,000,000 still due in Virginia. The correspondence 
shows how the two failed to agree in most points, and that they 
were at variance on the rights of the British traders to follow 
their business on American soil. Nothing came of this recrimi- 
nation, and Hammond alleging that European complications 
were causing delay in the considerations in London, and other 
objects coming in view, the matter was for a while dropped. 

Putnam, another of the new brigadiers, had been character- 
ized by Washington as possessing a " strong mind, and as a 
discreet man. No question has ever been made — that has 
come to my knowledge — of his want of firmness. In short, 
there is nothing conspicuous in his character, and he is but little 
known out of his own State and a narrow circle." Soon after 
his appointment, he was selected to follow \ip a mission to the 
Miamis, which had already been sent forward by a decision of 
the cabinet. On reaching Pittsburg in June, 1792, he found 
Wayne there, busily working at the problems before him. 
Passing down the river, Putnam met at Fort Washington ti- 
dings of the murder of Captain Alexander Truman, of the First 
Infantry, and his companions, who had gone ahead to reach the 
Miamis. After this, it was deemed foolhardy to follow in their 
track, and on July 5 Putnam sent back to Knox an urgent 
opinion that an attempt be made to treat with the Wabash In- 
dians instead. Hamtramck was still in command at Vincennes, 
but it was Washington's opinion that a negotiator of " more 
dignified character " should be sent, and Putnam was author- 
ized to proceed. He engaged Heckewelder, the missionary, to 
accompany him, and on September 13 they reached Vincennes. 
Ten days later, they entered upon negotiation, and after three 
days of belts and speeches, a conclusion was reached, by which 
the Pottawattamies and other tribes put . themselves under the 
protection of the United States. The great point gained was 
that it interposed a body of friendly Indians between the hostile 
Miamis and the southern Indians, who were accustomed to 
bring their aid, by a detour through the west. Putnam had 
gone rather farther than the Senate in the end was ready to 
approve, in that he had guaranteed to these remote tribes the 
safe possession of their lands. 



442 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

These possible abettors of the Miaiiiis on their western flank 
being thus placated, much depended, if there was to be peace, 
on an intercession with the Six Nations to secure their aid on 
the eastern flank of the Miami confederacy. The vital point 
in this endeavor was to gain the interest of Brant, who in the 
winter had declined cooperation, but was later persuaded by 
Kirkland to resist the dissuasive efforts of Sir Jolui Johnson. 
Washington records Brant's arrival in Philadelphia on June 
20, 1792, not far from the time that the misfortune to Truman 
was taking place. The President expressed the hojje that the 
government could impress the chieftain with its equitable inten- 
tions. If Brant's own words can be believed, he was offered 
a thousand guineas and double the amount he was receiving 
annually from the British government, if he would adhere to 
the American side. 

During his stay in Philadelphia, Brant dined with the Eng- 
lish minister, but without causing any comment. The cabinet 
was pleased with his peaceful disposition, and he promised to go 
himself to the western allies and intercede for the fulflllment 
of the Muskingum treaty. This was hopeful, but the expecta- 
tion was unstable. No sooner, on his return to Niagara, had 
he come in contact with adverse interests, than he wrote to 
Knox (July 26, 1792) that he could do nothing at the Mauniee 
council, if the United States insisted upon the Fort Harmar 
treaty. Three days later, he communicated with McKee, ask- 
ing if he should carry the American proposition to the Indian 
council. McKee, who informed Simcoe that he had himself 
urged the Indians to accept a similar restriction of their de- 
mands, told Brant to go to the council, but to have no hope 
of getting it to agree to the Fort Ilarmar line. Simcoe, who 
was full of the idea that the United States meant to attack the 
posts, had arrived at Niagara in Aiigust, and his views were 
not modified by what he heard. Brant, falling ill, was obliged 
to transmit his message by his son. 

Some weeks later, in September, 1792, the formal embassy 
of the Six Nations, in accordance with the agreement of the 
Senecas in Philadelphia, left Niagara inider the lead of Corn- 
planter and Red Jacket. Tlie council of the Miami confed- 
erates had been going on at the junction of the Auglaize and 
Maumee, with some interruption, since spring. McKee and 



THE INDIAN COUNCIL. 443 

Simon Girty had been much of the time in attendance, dealing- 
out powder and hatchets to the scalping parties, which at inter- 
vals came and went on their miserable errands. 

The Shawnees, promiuent in the council, had notified the Six 
Nations that they would receive no peace j^roposition excejjt 
through them, and so the Senecas had come with some expecta- 
tion of better treatment than they got. Cornplanter and Ked 
flacket found the smoke of the council fire curlino- aloft amid 
the October leaves. Representatives of many tribes, all the 
way from Lake Ontario to Lake Superior, and even from west 
of the Mississippi, sat crouched beneath the blue veil that went 
twisting upward. When the sjoeaker rose, there were shai'p 
lines soon drawn in their opinions. The Shawnees were un- 
equivocally for war, and the eyes of Simou Girty, the only 
white man admitted to their conference, gleamed with satisfac- 
tion. Amid all the tedious and reiterative verbiage customary 
in such sittings, it was evident that the mission of the Six 
Nations was unpropitious. When Red Jacket in his speech 
counseled peace, there were murmurs of distrust. So, after all 
was said, the urgent appeals of Cornplanter and his followers 
produced no other i-esult than that the final plunge into general 
hostility would be delayed till the Six Nations could arrange 
with the United States for another council at the Maumee 
rapids in the spinng of 1793, if, in the mean while, the federal 
government would withdraw their troo])s south of the Ohio. 

On the 12th of October, 1792, the council broke up. By the 
middle of November, Red Jacket was at BufPalo Creek ready 
to transmit to Philadelphia the decision of the confederated 
tribes. It was hardly a question with some Mohicans, who 
had returned from the Maumee with the Senecas, that war 
was inevitable. 

When Brant was in Philadeli)hia, Washington had forecast 
the alternative. " If they will not listen to the voice of peace," 
he said, "the sword must decide the dispute; and we are, though 
very reluctantly, vigorously preparing to meet the event." 
These preparations had been going on all suunuer. Enlist- 
ments had not been bi'isk, and Washington had occasion not 
only to urge more active measures, but to check the enrolling 
of what he called " boys and miscreants," for St. Clair's expe- 
rience was not to be forgotten. The President had watched 



444 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

anxiously the reports of Wayne to the secretary of war. He 
knew how much success depended upon a well-drilled force, 
and upon the cordial cooperation of the commander's officers, 
Knox had told him of the assiduity of Wilkinson, and he took 
occasion to let that brigadier know how much he appreciated 
his " zeal and ability." He cautioned Wayne, however he 
mio'ht avoid lavish expenditures in other matters, " not to be 
sparing of powder and lead to make his soldiers marksmen." 

Wayne at one time submitted plans of what Washington 
called " desultory strokes " upon St. Joseph and Sandusky, as 
calculated to distract the enemy, and to retaliate for the maraud- 
ing which we have seen McKee and Girty were encouraging 
at Auglaize. Washington, however, had little commendation 
for strokes at a venture, which might lose more men than the 
recruiting could replace. More important, as the President 
thought, was it to get correct information by scouts, either from 
the Indians or English, of the force to be encountered, so that 
when the time came for advancing there might be no groping 
in the dark. He also felt constrained to counsel a stricter 
supervision of the contractors at Pittsbui-g, so that the com- 
plaints which St. Clair had made might not be repeated. Here 
was the need of the care of an " economist," for John Pope, a 
traveler of this time, says that goods of every description are 
" dearer in Pittsburg than in Kentucky, owing to a combina- 
tion of scoundrels who infest the place." 

All through the summer, the levies, either on their way to 
Pittsburg or in camp there, had lost by desertions, and it was 
too difficult to enroll men to suffer this to go on. So, as the 
autumn advanced, it was under consideration to move the army 
onward to some spot better guarded against the chances of 
escape, and where the surrounding country had the features 
suited to practice the men in forest paths. Washington had 
been inclined to divide the force between Cincinnati, Marietta, 
and some spot not far from Pittsburg, where Wayne himself 
could remain in easy communication with the government. 
Finally, however, it was determined to make a winter camp at 
a point about twenty-seven miles below Pittsburg, and in No- 
vember, 1792, we find the President cautioning Wayne against 

Note. — The map on the opposite page, of Pittsburg and vicinity, is from Victor Collot's Jour- 
?iey in North America, Paris, 182G, Atlas, plate 8. 



7^^'^W!!!:^'^'^'^'' ' ""t: 



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' Kmi? occimietl zn i7g2, by Gen y 



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h^tk}k ' 



PITTSBURGH 




VrjVL.J^eee Poa t 



446 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

needless outlay in the barracks. When in the same month 
Washington met Congress, he confessed that recruiting had so 
fallen off that some additional stimulus must be devised. 

While these military preparations were going on, it remained 
the policy of the federal government to avert, if possible, the 
actual clash of arms. The proposition of the Miami confed- 
eracy at their last council opened the way, and there was the 
same channel of communication as before in the professed will- 
ingness of the Six Nations to intercede. Washington had 
little hope of appeasing the Indians, so long, he said, as they 
were " under an influence which is hostile to the rising great- 
ness of these States," as the neighboring British were supposed 
to be. The intercourse which the members of the government 
had had with Hammond had not, to say the least, removed the 
imjjression of latent hostility, and of a purpose to interpose, if 
possible, a barrier territory, appertaining to the Indians, by 
some new disposition of bounds in qualification of the treaty of 
1782. Hammond was but a young man, perhaps not as discreet 
as he should be, and he doubtless had a difficult part to play, 
and it may be that he did not deserve all the suspicion under 
which he lay at the time, and which has affected the disposition 
of American historians since. Jefferson bluntly told him that 
the public was not ready to accept his denial of England's com- 
plicit}^ in the enmity of the Indians ; though in diplomatic def- 
erence, the American government might not be so distrustful. 

In December, 1792, the cabinet had decidedly disclaimed any 
intention of accepting British mediation. If at that time they 
had understood Simcoe's character as well as they did later, 
they might not have agreed to allow his presence at the negoti- 
ations to be renewed. Simcoe was at the time firm in the belief 
that the Americans would make the intended conference an oc- 
casi(m to assert their rights to the navigation of Lake Erie, by 
conveying the provisions which their commissioners required 
over its waters in their own vessels. He accordingly sought 
instructions as to what conduct he should pursue in maintaining 
what he called British naval superiority on the lake. Clarke, 
who was acting at Quebec in the absence of Dorchester, em- 
])]iatically shared Simcoe's views, and the issue was ultimately 
avoided by a proposal of the Canadian government to furnish 
what supplies were required. 



THE AMERICAN COMMISSIONERS. 447 

The President, who had failed to induce Charles Carroll of 
Carrollton and Charles Thomson, the old clerk of the earlier 
Congress, to act as commissioners to the Indians, finally selected 
Benjamin Lincoln, Beverly Randolph, and Timothy Pickering. 
They were confirmed by the Senate, March 1, 1793. It was 
understood that some $50,000 worth of presents would be i)ut 
at their disposal, with authority to contribute annually #10,000, 
beside 12,000 to the head chiefs, as compensation for the accept- 
ance by the Indians of the terms of the Fort Harmar treaty of 
1789. To afford some play in their concihatory measures, the 
cabinet had already expressed an opinion that if peace could 
better be secured by it, the commissioners might consent to a 
line short of the Fort Harmar line, provided it kept secure all 
lands which the government had already appropriated, granted, 
or reserved. This was yielding what the disputed treaty had, 
in Jefferson's opinion, brought within the American jurisdic- 
tion, and he alone of the President's advisers contended that 
the concession was unconstitutional. His alternative was to 
retain jurisdiction, but to agree not to settle the unappropriated 
territory. It was his opinion, also, that any line was liable to 
error of description, because of the insufficient knowledge of 
the country, and that Hutchins's map, on which the treaty agree- 
ments had been marked, did not show the lines with any exact- 
ness, except where the bounds were brought to the Ohio River. 

On May 17, 1793, Randolph and Pickering reached Niagara, 
and Lincoln, who had been engaged in forwarding supplies, 
joined them eight days later. Here they learned of the decla- 
ration of war in England against France, and were well aware 
how it was goino- to embarrass the aovernraent's councils in 
Philadelphia, and might affect the situation on the Canadian 
bounds. To add to their anxieties. Brant had gone forward 
on May 5 to attend the pi-eliminary council, before they had 
had a chance to confer with him. Just about this time we 
learn from Zeisberger that the Mohawk chief, with eight canoes, 
was passing through the Thames country, on his way to the 
Maiunee. 

It was understood that the commissioners were to await at 
Niagara a summons to the conference. Simcoe was gracious, 
and for a while their days passed pleasantly. When it became 
known that the Miamis had sent messengers to express their 



448 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

inflexible purpose to insist upon the Ohio as the boundary, 
and the commissioners had revealed to their host a determi- 
nation as resolute to stand b}' the Fort Harmar treaty, the 
British commander saw that there was little chance of war 
being averted. Brant always held afterwards, with probably 
some knowledge of what the commissioners might on necessity 
yield, that, except for English interference, an accommodation 
might have been reached. We now know from Simcoe's letter 
that he profoundly distrusted the American purposes, and be- 
lieved that the commissioners were really aiming to alienate 
tile Six Nations both from the English and from the western 
tribes. 

Just as the Americans were to embark, on June 26, for San- 
dusky, some messengers from the Maumee arrived, complaining 
that Wayne was making hostile demonstrations while the ques- 
tion of peace or war Avas still undecided, and some days later 
the commissioners communicated a wish to the secretary of 
war that Wayne should be further cautioned. On embarking, 
the Americans found that Butler aiid McKee had been de- 
tailed to accompany them, as they had wished. They had only 
proceeded to Fort Erie, when they became wind-bound. On 
shore there was a stockade inclosing a few rough buildings, 
and outside a blockhouse, used for the king's stores. Lying 
there on July 5, Brant and fifty chiefs arrived from the Mau- 
mee, and, desiring a conference, it was decided to return to 
Niagara for better accommodations, and to hold the interview 
in Simcoe's house. The meeting was quickly over, and Sim- 
coe's letters tell us that, on July 7, Brant started with his mind 
nearly made up to recommend the yielding by the Indians of 
the settled lands north of the Ohio. A week later, the com- 
missioners followed, and landed, on July 21, on the Canada side 
of the mouth of the Detroit River. Here they foinid a depu- 
tation from the council, bearing a straight inquiry if the 
Americans would yield to the Ohio line, and the question was 
as pointedly answered in the negative. It was soon intimated, 
however, that if the Indians would confirm the Fort Harmar 
line, and yield up the territory granted to George Rogers Clark 
at the Ohio rapids, the commissioners would not ask for any 

Note. — The view on the opposite page from Lake Ontario, looking into Niagara River, was 
taken by the wife of Governor Simcoe in 1704. Fort Niagara is on the left. It is from D. B 
Read's Life and Times of Simcoe, Toronto, 1S90. 



450 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

right in the soil beyond these limits, but only the right of pre- 
emption. A Wyandot acted as spokesman, and stood firm for 
the Ohio. 

The next day, the 22d, the commissioners notified the council 
that they were ready for a meeting. From what we know of 
the proceedings of the Indians when this message was received, 
it is apparent that the discussions were very angry. The Shaw- 
nees, Twightwees, and Delawares pronounced loudly for war. 
Brant tells us that all hope of diverting them from it was 
lost, when messengers arrived from the Creeks announcing re- 
newed encroachments of the whites on their lands. Simcoe 
later professed to believe that Brant, in his advocacy of mod- 
eration, was in reality striving to embroil England and the 
United States, and Brant in return charged the English with 
the responsibility, because they promised aid to the Indians 
if they would resist American encroachments to the last. 

Instead of inviting the commissioners to the council, the 
tribes sent, on July 29, a deputation, with Simon Girty as inter- 
preter, and on the 30th the whole question at issue and the past 
history of their respective grievances were rehearsed. Girty, 
speaking for the Indians, insisted that the provisions of the 
Fort Stanwix treaty should be the basis of an agreement. The 
commissioners replied that the Stanwix treaty was made twenty- 
five years aback, and that it was modified when the treaty of 
1782 placed the bounds of the United States on the line of the 
lakes. This was hardly a happy reference, when a standing 
grievance of the Indians was that the treaty of 1782 paid them 
no consideration whatever, and dealt out their lands as if they 
did not belong to them. Nor was it helpful to be told that 
the Indians who sided with Great Britain in the revolutionary 
contest must accept the consequent necessity of modifying the 
original treaty of Fort Stanwix. Such modifications had taken 
place in the later treaty of Fort Stanwix, and in those subse- 
quently made with the Wyandots and Shawnees. To confirm 
all these by additional gratuities, the Indians were reminded 
that St. Clair had met six hundred Indians at Fort Harmar, 
and removed all objections. This having been done, and the 
ceded lands parceled out to white settlers, the United States 
were bound to keep faith with the grantees. To make the mat- 
ter still smoother with the tribes, they were willing, if the 



WAR INEVITABLE. 451 

grant to Clark at the Ohio rapids be incktded, to add as a new 
gift an unprecedented sum of money and many goods. 

These statements made no effect, and the conference ended. 
The next day the Indian delegates intimated that the commis- 
sioners had best go home, or at least such was the form of com- 
ment which Girty gave to their utterances. After some days 
the council sent a defiant answer in due form. They denied 
that the United States had any better right to buy their lands 
than the English had. They thought that the Americans, 
instead of offering money to them, had much better use it in 
buying out their grantees, so that they could turn the Indian 
land over to its true owners. During these later days of the 
conference, all efforts of Brant to induce Simcoe to interpose in 
favor of a compromise having failed, the commissioners had 
nothing to do but to declare that the end had come, and on the 
same day (August 16) they left Detroit for Fort Erie. At 
this point they dispatched a messenger to Wayne, who was 
waiting at Fort Washington, informing him of the failure to 
negotiate. The outcome was known in Philadelphia in Sep- 
tember, and it was generally believed, as Wolcott said, that the 
failure was " in great measure owing to British influence." 
Wasliington shared this distrust, and, as early as February, had 
cautioned Knox not to relax his preparations for war. 

Recruiting was going on slowly, and by March, 1793, Wayne 
had not received half his promised force. When the spring- 
had fairly opened, he had moved his two thousand five hundred 
men down the river to Fort Washington, and sent a summons 
for the mounted volunteers of Kentucky, which a committee, 
consisting of Judge Innes, John Brown, Isaac Shelby, Benjamin 
Logan, and Charles Scott, had been organizing. 

Wayne, as we have seen, had been directed to act on the 
defensive only, till he heard of the failure of the negotiations 
at the Detroit River. With this restraint he learned, not 
without irritation, of the raids which the Indians were making 
in every direction, but he prudently kept quiet. During the 
summer he had asked permission of Knox to send out a body 
of six hundred militia, away from the line of his proposed 
march, partly to deceive the enemy as to his intentions, and 
partly to distract their attention. The matter, as it happened, 
came before Wasliington and his advisers at the very meeting 



452 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 



at which they heard from the commissioners of their faihire. 
They were in no humor to risk defeat by dividing the western 
army, and the same messenger who carried to its general a 
confirmation of the tidings, which he had ah-eady received, of 

the fruitless task of the 
commissioners, took also 
a refusal to his proposal. 
The Indians naturally 
knew of the failure in 
advance, and in Septem- 
ber they fell upon one 
of AYayne's convoj^s and 
captured some horses. On 
October 6, Wayne wrote 
to Knox that the next 
day he should advance 
beyond Fort Jefferson to 
a position where he was 
to lay out a camp for 
winter quarters, and to 
be prepared to act as oc- 
casion required. The 
Kentucky volunteers 

[Tliis cut, taken from Howe's Historical Collections WCrC COmiUg lU slowly, 
of Ohio, p. 142, shows tlie line of the stockade at ojifl Ino oould UOt rCDOrt 
Greenville, in relation to the modern town.] ^ . 

more than twenty-six 
hundred regulars, with some four hundred horse militia and 
guides, the rest being detailed for garrison duty along his com- 
munications. He had taken pride in his cavalry, and he had 
divided them into companies, according to the color of the 
horses, — sorrel, bay, chestnut, and gray, — and, as he wrote 
to Knox, he was anxious lest the Indians would bring on an 
action where dragoons could not manoeuvre to advantage. 
William Priest, a traveler in the country at the time, says that 
"it is generally "imagined that Wayne will meet the fate of 
Braddock and St. Clair, but a few military men I have dis- 
cussed with are of another opinion, for the general is_forming 
a body of cavalry on principles entirely new, from which much 
is expected." 

His march was accordingly begun on October 7, 1793, and 




WAYNE'S PREPARATIONS. 453 

six days latei" he was laying out a winter's camp, six miles be- 
yond Fort Jefferson, vvliich he named in honor of his old com- 
mander in the southern department in the revolutionary days. 
Fort Greeneville or, as it was commonly written, Greenville. 

If his marching force was not all that he had hoped for, 
Wayne felt that many months of discipline had made a large 
jjart of them tough and ready warriors, and that he had some 
months before him for seasoning them in all the hardship and 
V skill of forest warfare. They already showed a marked pro- 
ficiency in loading and firing on the run, and were not inapt in 
springing to their work with loud hallooes, as Willet had recom- 
mended. Wayne, however, was still conscious of a murmuring 
discontent in some of the fresher levies, and he charged it upon 
the " baleful leaven " of the democratic cli\bs, which Genet was 
just now patronizing in the east, and whose refractory spirit was 
making its way over the mountains. 

The British scouts had reported his position as not two dajs 
distant from the Auglaize, and Dorchester heard of it and 
reported from Quebec to Dundas that, on October 18, Wayne 
had with him three thousand regulars, two thousand militia, 
and two hundred Indians, — a not unusual exaggeration. ~^ 

All through the autumn and winter there was anxiety in 
Canada. In February, 1794, Dorchester informed Hammond 
that Wayne's language, as reported to him, showed that he had 
hostile designs against the English. Evidently to gain time, 
about the end of 1793, the Delawares had opened communica- 
tion with Wayne, prevailed to do so "by sinister means," as 
McKee said. Nothing came of it, for Wayne insisted, as a 
preliminary, on the restoration of prisoners. Dorchester, in 
March, was evidently thinking that some coercion had been 
applied by the other tribes to make the Delawares firmer. 

Wayne was aware of the influence which Simcoe was now 
exerting on the Indian councils, and we have Brant's testimony 
that the British had given the Indians powder, and had led 
them to suppose that in case of disaster they would succor them. /^ 
Wayne examined the prisoners his scouts brought in to confirm 
such Intelligence, if there was ground for it. lie got little 
satisfaction, however. There were some who affirmed it, and 
others who denied it. There is no doubt, however, that Simcoe 
was wishing ardently for Wayne's defeat, and determined in any 



454 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

event to prevent supplies reaching him by the lake from Presqu'- 
Isle. He could not have been unprepared, later, to receive ad- 
vices from Dundas that, in case Wayne was beaten, the oppor- 
tunity should not be lost to secure a barrier territory between 
Canada and the Americans. Simcoe had not as yet received 
such implicit instructions, but he could easily divine them. A 
speech of Dorchester, which had reached Detroit, served an 
immediate purpose, but to arouse the Indians and to counte- 
nance Simcoe in active agencies in hel})ing them, Dorchester 
had lately been in council with the ministry, and his words 
stood easily for their opinions. This speech was a reply, which 
he had made on February 10, 1794, to an Indian delegation. 
Kingsford, a recent historian of Canada, thinks that its indis- 
cretions were but the natural revulsion which Dorchester felt 
when, fresh from England, he saw how great a hold the French 
Revolution had taken upon the Americans. Whether this 
was so or not, the speech was intemperate and incendiary, and 
when a report of it reached Philadeli)hia, Hammond sought 
to efface its effect by declaring that Dorchester had not been 
authorized to make it. It is certain that Dundas later rebuked 
the utterer for doing what was more likely '' to provoke hostili- 
ties than to prevent them." The language of the harangue 
was so unguarded that there was a tendency even in Phila- 
delphia to doubt its authenticity, — a belief that later misled 
Marshall and Sparks. Washington certainly accepted it, as did 
Clinton, who forwarded it to the President. It is now known 
to be preserved in the English archives, and Stone, the biogra- 
pher of Brant, found a certified copy among the papers of that 
chief. Another copy was sent to Carondelet. 

In this speech Dorchester charged the United States with 
bad faith in the boundary dispute ; that all advance of settle- 
ments since 1783 were encroachments, which nullified the Amer- 
ican right of preemption. He said he should not be surprised 
if England and the United States were at war in the course of 
the present year, and in that case the warriors would have the 
chance to make a new line, and appropriate all improvements 
which the Americans had made within it. 

Copies of the speech were circulated early in April, 1794, 
among the western Indians, Lieutenant-Colonel Butler being an 
active agent in the matter. Inspired by it, and acting indeed 



AT THE MAUMEE RAPIDS. 4,55 

under Dorchester's express orders, Simcoe, sharing- Dorchester's 
lack of confidence in the American protestations, took three 
companies of regulars to the rapids of the Maumee, and there 
hastily constructed a fort, necessary, in his opinion, as an outpost 
of Detroit, and intended to be a check in the way of Wayne's 
advance. This is the reason which Simcoe gives, on Ai)ril 11, 
in a letter written on the spot to Carondelet, who had asked 
him to join Spain in a campaign on the Mississippi, in resist- 
ance to the proposed French invasion of Louisiana. When 
Washington heard of this positive advance upon American ter- 
ritory, he called it the " most open and daring act " wdiich the 
British had attempted, and in sending instructions to Wayne, 
Knox conveyed the order of Washington that if, in the course 
of the campaign it should become necessary to dislodge the gar- 
rison of this fort, Wayne must do so. 

On June 7, some Indian prisoners were brought in, and from 
them ^^ ayne learned of Simcoe's advance. They also reported 
that there were two thousand Indians at the Maumee rapids, 
and that, including militia, the British of Fort Miami garrison 
counted about four hundred. One of the captives said that 
the British had promised to have fifteen hundred men in the 
coming fight. 

During June, 1794, Wayne was occupied with his daily drills. 
He exercised his men with sabre and bayonet, and kept out a 
cloud of scouts to prevent any s])y of the enemy getting within 
observation. Besides using his backwoodsmen for this service, 
he had a few Chickasaws and Choctaws. His wood -choppers 
were opening roads here and there, and serving to deceive the 
Indians as to his intended mai'cli. He had already sent a detail 
to the field of St. Clair's defeat, and had built there a small 
fort, which, in recognition of his reoccupation of the ground, he 
called Fort Recovery. On the 26th, General Scott reached 
^ Greeneville with sixteen hundred mounted Kentuckians, and 
among them was William Clark, the brother of George Rogers 
Clark, and later known for his passage of the Rockies. On the 
28th, he sent forward a party, and when near Fort Recovery, 
on the 30th, they were assailed by a rush of Indians upon some 
dragoons, who received the attack, charged in return, somewhat 
recklessly, and there was a considerable loss of horses, which 
Wayne could ill spare. It was thought that there were whites 



456 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

among the enemy. In order to deceive the Indians, he turned 
west and went on to the St. Mary's River, where he built a 
fort, which he called Fort Adams. In July, he turned east, and 
marched seventy miles to the confluence of the Auglaize and 
the Maumee. Here, on August 8, he built Fort Defiance, in 
the midst of immense fields of corn. He was now within sixty 
miles of the British fort, and his route to it lay along the banks 
of the Maumee. He sent forward a converted Shawnee to 
announce his readiness to treat for peace. Little Turtle, the 
Indian leader, was not disinclined to accept the oifer. His 
scouts had convinced him of the sleepless vigilance of Wayne. 
They had found it impossible to pierce the line of watchful 
spies by which the American commander concealed his force. 
Simcoe also had lost confidence in the ability of the Indians to 
withstand the Americans, and he had written to Dundas that, 
while he hoped for Wayne's defeat, he was by no means sure 
it would happen. " If Wayne attacks Detroit," he wrote, 
" you must be prepared to hear it is taken." 

Just at the time that Simcoe was building Fort Miami, the 
legislature of Pennsylvania had directed the occupation of 
Presqu'Isle, and on March 1, 1794, Governor Mifflin had in- 
structed Major Denny to raise a company of troops, and to 
proceed to that spot and protect the commissioners in laying- 
out the town. He was enjoined to avoid every unfriendly act 
which could possibly irritate the Indians or excite the enmity of 
the British garrisons not far off. While the spring came on, it 
was apparent that the movement had excited the fears of Brant 
and his countrymen, and that there was danger of active oppo- 
sition on the part of the British. It was even supposed that 
the American troops on the way to that point from Le Breuf 
would be met and driven back. In the latter part of May, the 
federal government, fearing such complications, and under- 
standing the hazard which Wayne was confronting, asked Gov- 
ernor Mifflin to suspend the movement. The request was looked 
upon as an interference with the rights of the legislature, which 
had simply ordered the occupation of their own territory, but 
Mifflin did not hesitate, and promptly issued orders in conform- 
ity with Washington's wislies, and at a later day the Assemldy 
confirmed them. The federal government were nevertheless 
fearful lest the resentful spirit shared by the Indians and their 



WAYNE ADVANCING. 457 

British friends might yet bring- peril, and Knox, in writing to 
Mifflin on July 17, declared that there could be no certain 
avoidance of the danger while British policy controlled the 
Indians. 

Matters were in this critical state when Wayne began his 
advance ; and just before the American general delivered his 
final stroke, Simcoe, apprehensive of the worst, and ignorant of 
Washington's interposition at Presqu'Isle, was writing to his 
superiors that unless disaster overtook Wayne, nothing could 
prevent the American occupation of the southern shores of 
Lake Erie from Buffalo Creek to ]\Iiami Bay, when there would 
be an end to British supremacy on the lakes. 

To revert to the hesitancy of Little Turtle. Had Brant been 
on the spot, that Lidian leader might have had au abettor in his 
tendency to treat with Wayne, though the movement to occujjy 
Presqu'Isle had done much to bring back the old antipathy of 
the Mohawks. Brant, at a distance, was disquieted over the 
rumors which reached him that it was soino- to be difficult to 
keep fast the Mackinac and other northwestern tribes who were 
threatening to leave. The messengers which the southern In- 
dians had sent to offer encouragement to their northern friends 
had not been followed up by the arrival of southern warriors, 
and the Miami confederates, without Brant and his associates 
on the one side, and with the Wabash tribes indifferent on the 
other side, found they had little to depend upon except the 
British, whose help they remembered had failed them in critical 
junctures in the past. So the chiefs had delayed to respond to 
Wayne's invitation. 

The Americans had nothing to gain by hesitation, and 
Wayne, on August 15, again advanced. His army now counted 
about two thousand six hundred men. He himself was not in 
good condition, for he was suffering from gout, and sat his liorse 
swathed in flannel. On his staff, yielding him assistance, he 
had a hero of later savage warfare, a future President of the 
Republic, in William Henry Harrison. 

The army was confident. In long drilling they had antici- 
pated all possible conditions. They knew there was no chance 
of being enveloped as St. Clair had been. They knew that 
their flanks were guarded, and if a chai'ge was ordered, the gap 



458 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

between tlie van and its snpports, and the hovering dragoons, 
woukl not permit their being cut off. In these and other pos- 
sibilities, the army enjoyed that sense of security which comes 
^ from knowing the vigilance of its commander. 

The next day, August 16, 1794, a messenger met the advance 
and delivered to Wayne a request that the Indians might have 
ten days in which to consider his proposals for peace. Wayne 
was not in a mood to dally. He hastily built a defense for the 
baggage which he intended to leave at that point, and moved 
on. On the 18th, he reached the upper end of the rapids. He 
threw up another breastwork to protect his provisions, and 
began to feel the enemy. He made up his mind there were 
from fifteen hundred to two thousand of them. McKee says 
they numbered one thousand three hundred. The British flag 
flaunted on the fort at the lower end of the rapids, and he 
knew not what he might have to encounter. Not far away, in 
a ground of their own choosing, encumbered with the trunks 
of trees which a whirlwind at some time had prostrated, and 
concealed by tall grasses which grew between, the enemy lay 
crouched. 

The action began with the Indians rising upon a band of 
mounted volunteers who were ahead, floundering over a ground 
where horsemen were at a disadvantage. The first line of in- 
fantry, flanked by other cavalry, came promptly to their sup- 
port. Their orders were to fire, charge, and continue firing as 
they ran. They put their practice in this difficult movement 
into play, and on they went, scrambling over and under the 
trunks, preserving a nearly even front. They gave the enemy 
no time to reload, and before the second line, with the support 
of Scott's Kentucky horse, could join in the contest, the Indi- 
ans were in headlong retreat. It took forty minutes to press 
them back — with not a chance to recover themselves — for a 
distance of two miles into the immediate vicinity of the British 
fort. Less than a thousand of Wayne's soldiers had won the 
day. 

There was no sign in the fort of any attempt to succor the 
savages. The hinges of the gates which were expected to open 
and receive the fugitives did not creak. The Indians had van- 
ished in the forests, and, as the commander of the fort informed 
his superior, no one knew whither. 



THE BATTLE WON. 459 

Wayne's loss in killed and wounded had been little over a 
hundred. There was never any report on the loss of the enemy. 
It is denied by the British writers that there were any whites 
in the fight. Against their general denial, there is Wayne's 
own testimony that British dead were found on the field. It 
has been asserted that a body of Detroit militia, seventy in 
number, commanded by a Captain Caldwell, participated in tlie 
action, and that four of them were killed. Brant, at a later 
day, said that he had procured the powder which was used from 
the British authorities at Quebec, and that he should have led 
his Mohawks in the figlit had he not been sick and at a dis- 
tance. So ended the battle of Fallen Timbers. 

Major Campbell, in charge of the British fort, sent next day 
word to Detroit that an action had been fought " almost within 
reach of the guns of the fort." The same day, August 21, he 
sent a flag to the American commander, asking what he meant by 
such threatening action in sight of his Majesty's flag. Wayne 
at once replied that his guns talked for him, but he rather need- 
lessly argued the point of the British encroachment in building 
a post on recognized territory of the United States. He closed 
with demanding its surrender. The next day Campbell replied 
that he could only receive orders to give up the fort from his 
own superiors, and threatened that if the insult to the British 
flag was continued, and the Americans came within range of 
his guns, he would open fire. There was a story started by a 
traveler, Isaac Weld, a year later, that Wayne rode up to the 
stockade with defiant bearing, so as to provoke a discharge, and 
give him a pretext for attacking. There is no other evidence 
of such an act. Wayne's last note was to ask the garrison to 
retire to some post which had existed at the time of the treaty 
of 1782. He wisely did not try to force such retirement, and 
Campbell bore himself with like restraint. 

Wayne contented himself with destroying the traders' huts 
in the neighborhood, including those of McKee, without a 
motion on the part of Campbell. Simcoe is said at a later day 
to have taken upon himself the credit of preserving the peace, 
since Dorchester, as he averred, had instructed him to attack 
Wayne. It is known from a letter to Hammond in September 
that Dorchester was confident of a conflict, to be brought on by 
Wayne's attacking the fort. 



460 THE NORTHWEST TRIBES AT LAST DEFEATED. 

After spending three days in completing the destruction of 
all property outside the fort, Wayne began a march by easy 
stages up the river. He swej^t away cornfields for fifty miles 
on each side of the stream. On reaching Fort Defiance, he 
put it in better condition for defense, and on August 28 sent 
off a dispatch to Knox. It was less than a month later that 
the first rumors of Wayne's success reached Philadelphia, on 
September 23, in advance of the official tidings. 

From Fort Defiance, Wayne continued his march up the 
Maumee. He reached the confluence of the St. Mary and St, 
Joseph on September 17, and by the 22d he had completed 
Fort Wayne at that strategic point where the portage to the 
Wabash began. He put Major Hamtramck in command. 

Simcoe, immediately upon the result of the campaign being 
known, had written to Brant that he hoped the Indians would 
" recover their spirits." He expected now by a conference at 
Fort Miami to help produce such a reaction. There he met 
McKee and Brant, and it was thought best to have a larger 
body in council at the mouth of the Detroit River on October 10. 

Meanwhile, Wayne, at his new stockade, was listening to the 
speeches of other factions of the tribes, who had learned by 
recent events not to place much confidence in British promises. 
Not all these speeches were reassuring, for there was occasion- 
ally a chief who would warm at Wayne's renewed proposals of 
confirming the treaty of Fort Harmar, and at such occurrences 
Wayne grew anxious and sent messages to Philadelphia for 
reinforcements to be ready for any emergency. 

The British conference at Detroit River came off as ar- 
ranged. Simon Girty was present as usual, and helped in the 
distribution of the British gifts. Simcoe now told the Wyan- 
dots and the others that they must stand for the Ohio bounds 
as resolutely as ever, and he promised that if the Americans 
approached Fort Miami again, they should be fired upon. We 
have Simcoe's speech and testimony about his advice from those 
who heard it, and Brant supported his insidious views. He 
urged the Indians to convey in trust to the British all the land 
north of the Ohio which was in dispute between them and 
the Americans, so as to give the British the right to interfere 
in protecting it. He also treacherously counseled the patching 



WAYNE AT GREENEVILLE. 4G1 

up of a temporary truce which would give both the English 
and the Indians the time for preparation which was needed, 
so as to renew the war with better promise in the spring. 

Such advice, however, failed of the intended effect, and it was 
soon apparent that Wayne had secured l)y his victory a vantage- 
ground that he could use to effect. The Delawares had already 
approached him, and Dorchester, kept informed by Simcoe of the 
general disaffection towards English interests which Wayne's 
vdii^lomacy was increasing, lost no time in informing the Ameri- 
can general that Grenville and Jay, now negotiating a treaty of 
pacification in England, had reached a conclusion by which the 
military conditions should remain for the present unchanged. 
The fact was that the British government were nu)re desirous 
of bringing to an end their critical relations with the United 
States than they wei'e willing to disclose to the American envoy. 
This growing policy of amity proved a sore grievance to Sim- 
coe, and he spent his energies during the closing months of 
1794 in seeking to prevent such a consummation. He urged 
that Fort Miami should not be abandoned. He waote to Ham- 
mond to stir him to a protest to the federal government against 
the demeanor of Wayne, who, in gaining the Indian favor, was 
thwarting some of Simcoe's cherished purposes. He wrote to 
the Lords of Trade offering them a plan for shutting out trad- 
ers coming from the American seaboard, by establishing British 
depots along the portages to the Mississippi valley, and par- 
ticularly by that at Chicago. He grew suspicious of Brant, and, 
to prevent his defection, sought permission to off'er the Mohawk 
chief a pension for his family. 

All this while, Wayne, who had reached Greeneville early in 
November, was receiving messages of peace from the same Wy- 
andots that Simcoe had flattei-ed at the Detroit River, and it 
was soon known that the tribes who had crossed the Mississijipi, 
to fight under Little Turtle, had recrossed it to Spanish ter- 
ritory. Wayne's plans for a final settlement in the following 
season were progressing with few halts. So, as Simcoe showed 
himself a man grasping at straws, but doomed to disappoint- 
ment, the year closed with Wayne growing more and more in 
stature as the arbiter of the red man's future. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

jay's treaty and the territorial integrity of the 
northwest secured. 

1794-1796. 

Late in 1793, the British government had shown a dispo- 
sition to approach the unsettled questions of the treaty of 
1782. On December 15, Jefferson stated to Hammond that 
the American grievances, so far as they related to the western 
country, were, in the first place, the retention of the posts ; next, 
the extension of British jurisdiction beyond the area of British 
possessions in 178-2 ; and last, the obstacles placed by the au- 
thorities in Canada in the way of the American right of navi- 
gation on the lakes. The solution of these questions at issue 
Avas necessarily affected by the attitude which Spain and France 
were assuming towards the United States, — a discussion cov- 
ered in other chapters. To side with England, which was a 
motive charged upon the federalists, was likel}^ to bring on 
a war with France, in which Spain might or might not be an 
indifferent spectator, but it was hardly possible that England, 
at least, would allow her to remain so. To side with France 
would inevitably incite hostilities in England, and with Eng- 
land's coercion Spain was not likely to escape an alliance with 
her. This was a contingency which the federalists greatly 
deprecated, and the republicans were hardly ready to force. A 
war with England meant, indeed, a chance for privateering, 
and the starting of such manufactui-es as would, under the re- 
strictions growing out .of war, be ultimately productive for the 
North. What a British war meant to the South was a relief 
from the pressing burden of the English debts, — a certain 
gain that obscured remoter loss. "The Virginians," said Oliver 
Wolcott, " in general hate the English because they owe them 
money. They love the French from consanguinity of charac- 
ter." Hamilton and the federalist leaders saw in an Enoiish 



JAY SENT TO ENGLAND. 463 

war an almost certain loss of the country north of the Ohio and 
stretching to the Mississippi, because of the ease with which the 
Canadian forces could be aided from the West Indies. In 
such a contingency, all the efforts which Wayne was making to 
save that region to the Union would avail little against the 
establishment of that barrier Indian territory, which was Sim- 
coe's dream. Such loss of territory must also give English 
merchants the coutrol of the Indian trade, a consideration 
which had been pressed upon the Board of Trade. 

In this complexity of chances there was much diversity of 
aim, even among those who resented the conduct of England. 
Jay grasped the situation. " Great Britain has acted unwisely 
and unjustly," he said (April 10, 1794), "and there is some 
danger of our acting intemj)erately." So people were easily 
grouping into three divisions. First, there were those who were 
for peace with England at all risks. Then, those who were for 
war, the sooner the better. Last, those who were irritated to a 
very frenzy, but were restrained from forcing an outbreak, if it 
could be avoided. 

There was a danger that a prolonged uncertainty would end 
in war, and Washington, eager to secure peace even at some 
sacrifice, determined to try the effect of a special envoy to the 
British court. On April 6, 1794, he sent the name of John 
Jay to the Senate as such an envoy. Jay had in the past made 
no hesitation in affirming that the Americans had made the 
first breach of the treaty of 1782. So both the envoy and 
the mission were little less than repulsive to the ardent haters 
of England. With the admirers of France it was questionable 
if any advance towards England under existing circiimstanees 
was not a transgression of the treaty of 1778 with that power, 
— an obligation which the federalists denied. Randolph, as 
secretary of state, undertook to explain to Fauchet, the French 
minister, — and there soon transpired signs of an existing 
dubious intercourse between the two, — that it was necessary to 
negotiate with England to avoid a war which the States were 
not ready to encomiter. John Adams, with a politician's eye, 
was at the same time supposing that the opposition to Jay arose 
from an apprehension that, if the mission was successful. Jay 
would be lifted into a dangerous competition with Jefferson. 

The most active objection in Congress to confirming the 



464 JAY'S TREATY. 

mission came from the South. This was largely for the alleged 
reason that an adjustment would benefit eastern commerce, 
and embarrass the South still more in the matter of the British 
debts. There was also a fear that immediate northern interests 
might be paramount to regaining the posts, and this was the 
plea of the South to the West for support. In the final vote, 
seven votes from Virginia, North and South Carolina, and 
Kentucky, with a single vote from New York, constituted 
the opjjosition, while eighteen votes, mainly from the North, 
secured the mission and committed Jay to a rather harassing 
task. The result was to thwart a proposed plan, which Madi- 
son and others had counted on, to extort redress from England. 
At near the same time, on an appealed case, the Supreme Court 
had decided that certain acts of the Virginia legislature, in- 
tended to relieve debtors to English merchants, were unconsti- 
tutional. Thus the southern project was doubly blocked. 

Jay's instructions were signed on May 6, and at this time 
the federal oovernment knew that Dorchester had made his 
threatening speech. They had not learned, however, of a 
result of that speech in the advance of Simcoe upon the Miami. 
If they had. Jay's instructions might have been more vigorous. 

When Jay reached England, on June 8, he suspected that 
the two countries had only narrowly escaped war, and that Dor- 
chester and Simcoe, in their recent acts, had been insj^ired by 
ministerial views. With better information we may now doubt 
if he had good grounds for his apprehension, and may rather 
believe that the ministry were only too ready for some sort of 
an accommodation. This appearance, to Jay's mind, arose in 
part from the fear, which he thought was entertained, that 
AVayne really intended to attack Detroit ; while the more con- 
ciliatory spirit which he found in Grenville, when he first had 
his interviews with him, was to be traced to a change in conti- 
nental affairs, which had suddenly become a cause of alarm to 
the ministry. Three days later (June 23), Jay learned from 
Dr. William Gordon, the historian of the American Revolution, 
then living in England, that the United States must not expect 
to secure the surrender of the posts. Jay, in reporting Gor- 
don's views to Washington, confessed that he did not see the 
insuperable difficulties which alarmed Gordon. A week later 
(June 27), Jay and Grenville were fairly at their work. By 



THE TREATY SIGNED. 465 

tlie middle of July, they had so advanced in mutual confidences 
that Jay assured the English minister that Wayne had no in- 
structions to attack the posts, and Portland communicated the 
assurance at once (July 15} to Dorchester. Whereupon the 
two negotiators agreed that there should he nothing done, un- 
friendly in act, anywhere along the Canadian frontier. Jay 
so notified Washington on July 21, and the English sent to 
Dorchester a message which, we have seen, was transmitted 
from Quebec to Wayne. 

After this the interchange of views went slowly on, all tend- 
ing to establish, at last, a common ground. Jay was some 
fifteen weeks or more away from his government, counting the 
out and return voyages. He grew, in his isolation, confident 
that whatever he did would find inimical critics, and he wrote 
to the President that he trusted, whatever might happen, to 
" the wisdom, firmness, and integrity of the government." 

There did not grow up in the States much confidence in Jay's 
accomplishing anything till some time in October, and then 
tlie French faction grew certain that he could but sacrifice 
the honor of the country. These revilers were convinced that 
Washington had failed to tlo what he could to rescue Tom Paine 
from the imprisonment into which Kobespierre had thrown him, 
and that this indifference of the President was due to his fear 
that England, which hated Paine, might resent any sympathy 
for him. Under such circumstances, one readily understands 
wliy Paine, learning by rumor something of Jay's relations with 
Grenville, called it " a satire upon the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence," and such opinions were easily wafted across the waters. 

On November 19, Portland wrote to Dorchester that the 
treaty had been signed, but that its contents would not be 
divulged till both governments had ratified it. Jay transmitted 
the same day to Oliver Ellsworth his opinion that he had ex- 
acted as nuich as could be })rocured. Copies of the treaty were 
sent off by different vessels on November 20 and 21. The first 
was thrown overboard at sea to prevent the French capturing 
it. The other ultimately reached its destination. 

The British govei'nment, not yet possessed of Fauchet's inter- 
cepted dispatch, soon to be in their hands, had already taken 
their measure of Randolph, the American Secretary of State, 
and, because of his hard denunciations of English action, pro- 



466 JAY'S TREATY. \ 

fessed to believe his temper would be inimical to peace, and 
at once notified Hammond to avoid intercourse with him, to 
compass his downfall if possible, and to seek Hamilton instead 
as the means of concerting action for the suppression of Indian 
hostilities along the frontiers. 

Before any of the official communications could reach Phila- 
delphia, a fast vessel, leaving Ramsgate, had arrived at Cape 
Ann, bringing word that the treaty had been signed; this was 
known in Boston on January 29, 1795. Nearly six weeks later, 
on March 7, the treaty itself was in the hands of Washington, 
and remained there, a secret possession, shared only by those 
closest to him, for three months. Jay reached New York on 
May 28, to find himself chosen governor of New York two days 
before. Summonses had already been sent for the assembling 
of the Senate on June 8, to take the treaty into consideration. 
Fauchet, ignorant of the outburst which his disclosures about 
Randolph was soon to produce, interceded with the government 
to prevent the presentation of the treaty to the Senate till his 
successor, Adet, with the views of the French government on 
the crisis, could arrive. The new French minister did not reach 
Philadelphia till June 13. At thnt time, the treaty was before 
the Senate, in the usual secret sessions, and that body was 
known to have assembled in nearly full numbers. There were 
rumors of the hard fate which had been planned for it, and the 
reports did not misrepresent the fact. The opposition was 
Avarm. There was no sure index to the ardent discontents in 
local sympathies. Of the western members, Humphrey Mar- 
shall stood for it ; Blount was against it. It was, however, 
owing to the strenuous exertions of Plamilton and Rufus King 
that the instrument was saved, and then only by accepting an 
amendment that did not, moreover, particularly concern the 
west, but affected the trade with the West Indies. With this 
change, it took its final stages, on June 24, by a vote of twenty 
to ten, and on June 26 the Senate adjourned. ■ 

The treaty was to have been given to the public on July ' 
1, but the Aurora, a newspaper inimical to the government, 
secured the substance of it, and printed it in imperfect shape 
on June 29. Two days later, the genuine text was accessible. 

Before considering the uncertainty in Washington's miiid 
whether he should allow it to become a law, it will be well to 



CANADIAN FUR TRADE. 467 

review at some length such of its provisions as affected the west- 
ern country. The agreements respecting the commerce of the 
seaboard, and the establishment of commissions to adjudicate 
upon the debt, did not affect the people beyond the mountains 
except as they in some degree shared in the fortunes of the 
east. Of the t|25,000,000 to be placed as claims against the 
American debtors, a small part concerned the western people, 
and little was at stake with them when the whole business of 
the claims was brought to a close in 1804. In respect to the 
trade with Canada, the west had a principal interest, for b}^ 
the provisions of the treaty the eastern merchants were in some 
measure shut out from it. It was, on the whole, a gain to the 
west, for it opened the St. Lawrence route to the sea for western 
produce, with low duties, and none for furs. It also promised 
that return merchandise could be brought to a large section of 
the west at less cost than transportation over the mountains 
would entail. It was Hamilton's opinion, about the rights 
accorded to the Indian traders to pass the boundary line in 
either direction for traffic, that the United States would profit 
more than Canada. He also believed that these provisions 
blocked " the dangerous project of Great Britain to confine the 
United States to the Ohio," and that they tended " most power- 
fully to establish the influence and authority of the general 
government over the western country." The objection which 
was pressed was that the Constitution was violated in taking 
from Congress the right to regulate trade, and vesting it in the 
treaty-making power. When, later, it was attempted to regu- 
late this Indian trade another way by Wayne's negotiation, tlie 
paramount authority of Jay's treaty was allowed at the instance 
of Great Britain. 

It was, indeed, true at this time, as General Collot, who was 
a little later inspecting these conditions, saw, that the tribes and 
fur-bearino^ animals south of the lakes and east of the Missis- 
sippi did not constitute the chief resource for what was projjerly 
called the fur trade. The favorable conditions were, in fact, to 
be found west of the Mississippi, in Spanish territory, to which 
access must be had through what the treaty of 1782 had recog- 
nized as American territory. It was from this country that 
the English house of Tode & Co., who had bought the right 
from the New Orleans government for £20,000, had, by making 



468 JAY'S TREATY. 

fortified stations along the St. Peter and Des Moines rivers, 
almost completely driven the Spanish traders, notwithstanding- 
the transporting of furs to New Orleans by the Mississippi was 
much easier than to take them to Montreal. 

The Spanish had kept the Missouri River in their own hands, 
and, two miles from its mouth, they maintained a trading-post, 
St. Charles, which, with its hundred and more houses, was the 
remotest station in this direction. The river, as Collot said, 
had been explored upward more than six hundred leagues 
without finding any obstruction. Its current was said to be 
gentle till it received the Platte, which after their junction 
forced the stream rapidly along. That French traveler reached 
the conckision that the Missouri must rise in a prolongation 
of the Cordilleras, which Mackenzie had called the Stony Moun- 
tains, while they were known to the tribes as the Yellow Moun- 
tains ; and these mountains were reported to run parallel to the 
coast of the South Sea, a hundred or a hundred and twenty 
leagues distant. The notions then prevailing placed high up 
on the Missouri the Big Bellies (eight hundred warriors) and 
just below them the Mandans (three hundred warriors). Their 
trade was mainly by the Red River to the Indians about Hud- 
son's Bay ; but over the mountains, fifteen to twenty days 
distant. Mere the Crows, on a river which communicated with 
the South Sea. 

Of the X19,000 in duties which wei*e paid on American furs 
in London, a large part came from Spanish Louisiana, and 
nearly all from west and north of the lakes. This was partly 
occasioned by the fact that the Spanish traders, so far as they 
rivaled the English ones, were obliged to draw their supplies 
from Montreal, which they paid for in peltries. The English 
were particularly active on the St. Peter and Des Moines, where 
they came in contact with the Sioux. To reach the St. Peter 
the English passed from Lake Superior to the Goddard River, 
thence by a portage of nine miles to the St. Croix, and so to 
the Mississippi. They took the Green Bay and Wisconsin 
River route to reach the " Moins " River, which was of less 
importance in this trade than the St. Peter. The English had 

Note. — Tlie map on the opposite page is from Guthrie's Keic System of Geograpfiy m a "Map 
of the United States agreeable to the Peace of 1783," London, 1785-92. It shows the supposed 
islands of Lake Superior and tlie Grand Portage. 



470 JAY'S TREATY. 

made their cliief depot of supplies at Mackinac, but now that the 
treaty was to transfer this ])ost, they were planning to maintain 
their connection with the trans-Mississippi covmtry from St. 
Joseph's Island in the channel connecting Lakes Superior and 
Huron. Thence to Montreal, their usual route had lain by the 
old portage to the Ottawa from Lake Huron. Though the 
portages in this course were numerous, their canoeists could 
count more accurately on the time required in reaching Mon- 
treal by this course than by that of the lakes, since adverse 
winds on these waters sometimes delayed their boats, and made 
their arrival too late for shipment to England. 

Under these circumstances, and knov/ing that the surrender 
of the posts would strengthen the American jurisdiction over 
the extreme limits of the Republic, Grenville had stubbornly 
contended for a rectification of the bounds west of Lake Supe- 
rior, so that the Canadian traders could pass to upper Louisiana 
over British territory. This question was mated with another, 
namely, that of the British riglit to navigate the Mississippi, as 
provided b}^ the treaty of 1782, and complicated also by the 
demands of Spain in the same direction. 

The treaty of 1782 had drawn the northern boundary line of 
the United States due west from the Lake of the Woods alono; 
the 49th parallel, till it struck the headwaters of the JMissis- 
sippi. The sources of that river, it was now known, were 
considerably south of that line, and therefore at no point did 
British territory touch the Mississippi, upon which the treaty 
gave her the right of navigation ; for while Amei'ica and Spain 
held the river at the north, the latter country possessed both 
banks at its mouth. It was Grenville's claim that since the 
treaty gave England a right upon the river, she was entitled to 
a rectification of the boundary so as to assure that right. Jay 
ex])lained the grant of such a right on the river to have been 
allowed by the United States because, at the date of the treaty, 
it was supposed, as the secret article of the treaty indicated, 
that England, in the general treaty, then soon to follow, would 
secure, in the acquisition of west Florida, a boundary on the 
river at the south. That accession of territor}^ not taking 
})lace, the Americans claimed that the right of navigating the 
river either lapsed, or, if it held, it must be considered as exist- 
ing without a boundary on the river. 



THE TREATY MAPS. 



471 




Grenville insisted upon an opposite view, and, to get Lis de- 
sired boundary, proposed running a line from Lake Superior in 
one of two ways, so that the u})per waters of the river shoiild 

traverse British territory. 

These alternative proposi- 
tions were, in the one in- 
stance, to run a due west 
line from West Bay, on 
Lake Superior, to the east- 
ern l)ranch of the Mississip- 
j)i, as some of the British 
maps had already drawn it ; 
and, in the other, to run a 
line from the mouth of the 
St. Croix Kiver, at the Mis- 
sissippi, dne north till it 
struck the boundary be- 
tween the Lake of the 
Woods and Lake Superior. 
Jay replied that he could 
only consent to close the 
gap between the source of 
the Mississippi and latitude 
49^ by the most direct line. 

The map which Grenville brought forward to illustrate his 
views was Faden's map of 1793. In this map the Mississippi 
was drawn as known only to about a degree above the Falls of 
St. Anthony. North of this point there were three branches, one 
of which nmst probably be the true Mississippi. One of these 
flowed from a marshy lake in 45°. A second flowed from 
White Bear Lake near 46°. Each of these were marked " Mis- 
sissippi by conjecture." The third branch issued from lied 
Lake in 47°, and was called " Lahontan's Mississippi." Jay 
objected to the acceptance of any tentative geograi)liy. and pro- 
posed a survey to gain precise knowledge. He contended that, 
as the American commissioners in 1782 had offered an alterna- 
tive of the 45° and 49°. and the latter had been accepted, the 
decision must stand, and the Mississippi must either be shown 
to cross that parallel, or must be connected with it by the short- 
est line. 



FUND'S MAP. 

[Tins map is reproduced from E. D. Neill's " In- 
accurate Knowledge of the Sources of the Missis- 
sippi at the Close of the Last Century," one of the 
Manchester College Contribu/ions, 3d series, No. 
1. It is taken from Peter Pond's "Map of the 
Hudson's Bay Country, 1785," in the State De- 
partment at Wa.shington, and Neill calls it " the 
first map after 1783 to show that the Mississippi 
did not reach any point west of the Lake of the 
Woods."] 



472 JAY'S TREATY. 

Jay persistently clung- to his view, and Grenville yielded, con- 
senting- to a survey from one degree below the Falls of St. 
Anthony northward, leaving- the definite connecting line for 
future consideration. 

While the commissioners intending to make this survey were 
preparing for their work, they learned that the belief among 
the traders as to the upper waters of the Mississippi was of 
this sort : Following- the river up beyond the Falls of St. An- 
thony a hundred leagues, you reached Crow Wing River on the 
left. Another hundred carried you to Sandy River on the 
right, up which those wishing- to reach Lake Superior usually 
went. Still a hundred leagues more, and Leech Lake was 
reached, which was held to be the true source of the jMissis- 
sippi, and it was fifty leagues southeast of the Lake of the 
Woods. These northwestern bounds, as described in the Que- 
bec Bill in 1774, and repeated in Carleton's commission in 
1775, had been uncertain, in that a due north line from the 
mouth of the Ohio was prescribed, without defining- it as follow- 
ing the curves of the Mississippi, till it reached the southern 
bounds of the Hudson Bay Company. 

How true, now, this trader's geography may have been was 
soon to be decided by a survey, which the North West Company 
ordered David Thompson to make, so as to determine how 
many of their posts were south of 49°, and consequently in 
American territory. In March, 1798, that surveyor started 
west on the 49th parallel. He first found two of the company's 
houses on the Red River south of that boundaiy. In April, he 
reached a four-mile carry, by which he entered upon a river 
which conducted him, thirty-two miles away, to Red Lake, 
where the North West Company had temporary trading-posts, at 
a spot found to be in 47° 58' 15". There he found a portage 
of six miles, and, four days later, passing through a level coun- 
try spotted with ponds and luxuriant with wild rice, he entered 
upon Turtle Lake, an expanse of water four miles square, but 
having lateral bays, which gave its outline a resemblance to 
that animal. This was then recognized as the source of the 
Mississippi, and in 1782 it had been supposed to lie farther 
north tha^i the Lake of the Woods. This error has been ac- 
counted for by supposing that the fur traders, in ascending these 
upper waters of the Mississippi, reckoned as a league (three 



I 



THE USE OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 473 

miles) the time it took to smoke a pipe, while in reality only 
two miles were passed over in that time. Thompson found the 
north end of the lake to be in 47° 38' 20", or one Inmdred and 
twenty-eight miles south of the point where the map-makers in 
1782 had supposed it. There was another post of his eomjiany 
on lied Cedar Lake near by. In May, Thompson passed down 
the Mississippi, two hundred miles by the winding of the stream, 
to Sand Lake Kiver, up which he turned towards Lake Supe- 
rior, and in this neighborhood he found two other stations of 
the North West Comi)any. 

Thompson's wanderings had shown how many posts must be 
abandoned, as in American territory, and had also shown to the 
satisfaction of the waiting commissioners that Turtle Lake, as 
the source of the Mississippi, was something short of two de- 
grees south of the 49° boundary. The acce23tance of Thomp- 
son's observations then, and the acquisition of Louisiana a few 
years later, took from the extreme northwest line all interna- 
tional importance. 

Hamilton, in May, 1794, had urged Jay to try to get England 
to help in the matter of forcing Spain to open the lower Missis- 
sippi " by giving her a participation in that navigation ; but," he 
added, " with negotiations going on with Spain it must be man- 
aged carefully." Jay did not forget Hamilton's injunctions, and 
he conceded to England by the treaty her right to navigate the 
Mississippi, as it had stood in that of 1782, with the additional 
provision that all ports on the eastern side of the river, Avhether 
belonging to one party or the other, should be open to British 
traders in the same way that the seaboard ports were. While 
some held that this concession to England was a shrewd one, to 
gain her adhesion in treating with Spain for the opening of the 
river, it was looked upon by others as affording the British an 
opportunity of monopolizing the trade of the river under the 
cover of their gunboats. 

Tliis agreement of Jay and Grenville as to the joint use of 
the Mississippi gave great offense to Spain, and in her protests 
she was supported by the French Directory. Spain claimed 
that the right of navigation which England acquired by the 
treaty of Paris, In 1763, was surrendered when she gave up 
west Florida to Spain in 1782, a position which both England 
and the United States denied. " The Spaniards are feverish 



474 JAY'S TREATY. 

with respect to the MisslssIjDpi article," wrote Wolcott to Ham- 
ilton in July, 1795. 

The treaty offered another point of attack to, its opponents, in 
that there was no specific agreement on the part of Grenville 
tliat English agents would in the future abstain from inciting 
the Indians to hostilities. Jay's instructions had directed him 
to require that, " in case of an Indian war, none but the usual 
supplies in peace should be furnished " by the English to their 
Indians and their allies. A contrary conduct had long been 
the subject of complaint by the American government. " The 
British government," the instructions further said, " having 
denied their abetting of the Indians, we must of course acquit 
them. But we have satisfactory proofs that British agents are 
guilty of stirring up and assisting with arms and ammunition 
the different tribes of Indians against us." To such com- 
plaints Grenville had given as emphatic a denial of complicity 
on the part of the government as ever Hammond had done, 
and he authorized Jay to assure the President that " no instruc- 
tions to stimulate or promote hostilities by the Indians have 
been sent to the king's officers in Canada." 

The negotiations for the giving up of the posts seem to have 
gone on without impediment, except as to the date for the final 
surrender. The victory of Wayne had, before the negotia- 
tions closed, rendered the question of a barrier territory nuga- 
tory. The actions of Simcoe, aimed at the accomplishment of 
such a reservation, had of late increased in daring. At the 
end of August, Washington had had occasion to bring a rash 
deed of that British agent to the attention of Jay. 

During the summer. Colonel Williamson, who, as trustee of 
Sir William Pulteney, managed a large landed property in 
New York, which had been bought of Robert Morris in April, 
1792, on the borders of Lake Ontario, had begun a settlement 
at Sodus Bay, forty miles west of Oswego. On August 16, 
Lieutenant Sheaffe, sent by Simcoe's orders, had appeared in 
the harbor and demanded the abandonment of the jdace. The 
party, on retiring, is said to have carried off some flour, and 

Note. — The opposite map of tlie Geiiessee country and the Niagara road is from Samuel Lewis's 
" State of New York," in Carey''s American Atlas, Philadelphia, 1795. 



476 JAY'S TREATY. 

Williamson made preparations to resist in case of further 
demands. 

The ground assumed by Simcoe was that, while the negotia- 
tors in London were at work, the Americans should not have 
advanced their occupancy. When Washington heard of Sim- 
coe's movement, he looked upon it as the first denial by the 
British of American rights to their own territory beyond the 
jurisdiction of the posts, and wrote to Jay that he considered it 
" the most open and daring act of the British agents in Amer- 
ica." This served to bring Jay to this part of the negotiation 
with more nerve, perhaps, than he assumed on any other point, 
though his critics later blamed him for not pressing a claim of 
indemnity for the twelve years of the posts' detention. Jay 
doubtless saw the difficulty in this last particular, as Hamilton 
did in defending him, for it would have inevitably opened the 
question of the first infraction of the treaty of 1782, and in- 
duced a course of mutual crimination, a j^rocedure surely to be 
avoided if an amicable ending was to be reached. Jay had 
stood for June 1, 1795, as the date of surrender ; but Gren- 
ville could not be brought to any nearer date than on or before 
June 1, 1796. The interval was certainly not long, if the mer- 
chants were to be allowed time to close up their business and 
withdraw their merchandise, widely scattered, and we have seen 
what a number of stations the Noitli West Company had 
planted in the American territory. It was certainly not too 
long a time if there was any justice in the claim, which the fac- 
tors at Montreal had always made, that five years were neces- 
sary to bring their business to an end. There were political 
considerations, also, in giving the Indians an interval to get 
familiar with the prospect of a change, as conducing to an easier 
transfer when the time came. 

The delay, however, afforded a text for other animadversions 
of the opponents of the treaty. It was said that the interval 
was sufficient for England to get loose from continental compli- 
cations, and, these over, she would be in no better mood to give 
the posts up than she was in 1783. The posts not being dis- 
tinctly named was another point of complaint, nor was there 
any definite explanation of what territorial jurisdiction the posts 
carried with them, and in case of further complications the 
whole barrier question might again arise. But these were con- 



WASHINGTON AND THE TREATY. 477 

tingencies like any other likely to arise with treaties negotiated 
in bad faith, and hardly to be guarded against. The grants 
about Detroit, which the British had made. Jay had agreed to 
recognize ; but he demanded and gained from Grenville the 
absolute freedom for the Americans to occupy in the interim 
any lands not clearly within the survey of the post, and that, 
in effect, no such interference as that of Simcoe at Sodus Bay 
should again happen. There was also a j)rovision for allowing 
residents in and about the posts to transfer their allegiance 
to the United States, if they desired to become, in this way, 
American citizens. This did not escape cavil, and it was 
pointed out that the Constitution provided for an " uniform 
rule of naturalization." 

The sections of the treaty, which have now been examined, 
related closely to western interests and the possible application 
of them in the near future. They were but part of the consid- 
erations now brought under the attention of Washington, while 
he was determining his course of approval or disapijroval. He 
soon became the centre of observation. From all sides remon- 
strances and petitions to affect his decision came in upon him. 
He told his friends that he had never before encountered so 
trying a crisis, nor one in which there was " more to be appre- 
hended." 

While his decision was pending, Washington retired for an 
interval of calm to Mount Vernon. Here he was followed by 
the insatiable correspondent. In a letter which he wrote at 
Mount Vernon, he gives an index of his feelings, showing that 
while there was that in the treaty to question, intemperate judg- 
ments found too much to criticise. 

Meanwhile, in Boston, the merchants were fuming with pas- 
sion at the thought of such a treaty : but it was not long before 
it became known that Gore and Cabot were making headway 
in producing a revulsion of sentiment. It was reported that 
Jay had been hung in effigy in Philadelphia. In Virginia 
there was almost a revolution, and there was talk of taking 
the treaty-making power from the Senate and giving it to the 
people. Leading Virginians were accountable for such incen- 
diarism. Monroe could speak of the pusillanimity of Jay. 
Madison could assert that the " dearest interests of our com- 



478 JAY'S TREATY. 

merce and the most sacred dictates of national honor " had 
been sacrificed to an English connection. Jefferson believed 
that if the treaty became a law, it was a British triumph, and 
it could be endured only by a people impressed by the personal 
merits of the President. The legislature of Kentucky pro- 
nounced it unconstitutional. In South Carolina, Rutledge re- 
peated the wild clamor. 

The fact was, that the way in which the treaty was regarded 
had for the moment become the sujireme test of party steadi- 
ness. The republicans gathered in opposition to it every ele- 
ment of dislike for England, and every faction of admirers of 
the French. The debtor class, looking to relief in a war with 
England, naturally swung to their side, and they gave a vio- 
lence, cohesion, and stubbornness to their cause in the South 
which it did not have in the North. 

Jefferson, in a letter to Ebeling of GiJttingen, intended to 
affect that author's judgment in his intended book on the 
United States, sought to show that the republicans were not 
only the great mass of the people, and landholders and laborers 
to a man, but that their aggregated wealth surpassed that of 
the federalists. Thomas Cooper, a new sojourner in the coun- 
try, wrote to a friend in England : " The conduct of your court 
has certainly given strengtli to the anti-federal party, among 
whom may now be ranked the majority of the people and the 
majority of the House of Representatives," and he probably 
reflected the belief of ardent republicans. 

Jefferson, as the leader of the opponents of the treaty, feared 
more than anything else the ability and influence of Hamilton, 
and urged Madison to enter the lists against him. Hamilton, as 
the recognized champion of the treaty, made, perhaps, the most 
effective of his appeals for the treaty under the name of " Ca- 
millus." Wherever his arguments found lodgment, the belief 
grew and was strengthened that the rejecting of the treaty 
meant drifting into a war with England and a delay in set- 
tling the national account with Spain, since she was likely, in 
that event, to seek an alliance with Great Britain. At a later 
day, Hamilton spoke less temperately, and not so publicly, when 
he called the opposition " the mere ebullition of ignorance, of 
prejudice, and of faction," and he might well have said so of the 
aspersions of Callender, which, there was indeed much reason 



THE TREATY APPROVED. 479 

to believe, were prompted, if not by the solicitation, at least by 
the countenance of Jefferson and Madison. Indeed, the country 
was in a bellicose mood, and there was little prospect of calmer 
councils. " The exaspei-ation against England is great," said 
Rochefoucault-Liancourt, who was looking on ; " it spreads 
through all ranks in society. In my opinion, Jay's negotiation 
will hardly be able to smother the glowing spark." William 
Priest, another traveler, said, " A war with England at this 
time would be very popular." 

These were the burning feelings that prevailed when Wash- 
ington, on August 11, returned to Philadelphia, and three days 
later discussed with his advisers the course to be taken. It 
had, perhaps, become more difficult now to reach a prudent 
determination than it had been at an earlier stage. There were 
two developments that urged action in different directions. 
One was an order of the British government to capture all neu- 
tral vessels carrying provisions to France. The other was the 
British interception of a dispatch from Fauchet, which had been 
transmitted to the American government. By this, which was 
for a while kept from Randolph's knowledge, it looked as if 
that secretary, who was the only one of the cabinet attached 
to the French interests, had been making applications of at 
least a questionable character to the French envoy for loans 
to certain debtors to England, so as to affect their conduct. 
It was the discovery of this seemingly treacherous conc(uct of 
one of his advisers that largely influenced the President to 
a prompt adhesion to the treaty. On August 14, the cabinet 
advised him to approve the treaty, and on the 18th, Washing- 
ton signed it, and secured the counter-signature of Randolph, 
as secretary of state, before the latter was confronted with the 
evidence of his dealings with the French envoy. The signing 
of the treaty and the exposure of Randolph were charged by 
Jefferson, and have been assigned by later vindicators of Ran- 
dolph to an impulse of servility in the President's mind, as well 
as to the strengthening of his prejudices by the intrigues of 
Pickering and Wolcott, who were making the most of palpa- 
ble indiscretions of Randolph, On August 26, instructions 
were sent to John Quincy Adams, then at the Hague, to pro- 
ceed to London and exchange ratifications, if the British would 
accept — as they did — the Senate's amendment. He was to 



480 JAY'S TREATY. 

insist, also, on the withdrawal of the offensive provision order, 
but was not to push his objections to a degree that would en- 
danger the treaty. Everything went well, and on October 28 
the ratifications were exchanged, and on February 29, 1796, 
proclamation was made of the treaty's binding force. 

Two days later, Washington notified Congress, and it was 
left to the House of Representatives to make the necessary 
appropriations of money to carr^ the treaty into effect. The 
President was congratulating himself that there had been a 
great change in jiublic sentiment in favor of the treaty during 
the last two months, when suddenly an opposition on the part of 
a faction in the House, threatening to become a majority, devel- 
oped itself, not altogether unexpectedly, however. It assumed 
the ground that, as coordinate with the President and Senate in 
making treaties, through its constitutional power to withhold 
ajiproi^riations at its pleasure, the House had a right to block a 
treaty by inaction when it disapproved its provisions. There 
was clearly an occasion in this seeming conflict in the constitu- 
tion for a precedent, and the House seemed for a while likely to 
establish one, to have the force of a judicial decision, if that were 
possible. Jefferson had before this given his support to this 
recalcitrant party. To bring the matter to an issue, the House 
voted to request the President to transmit to it all the papers 
relating to the treaty. The President, advising with his cabi- 
net, resolved to sustain his prerogative and refused the request. 
While Washington had the vote of the House under considera- 
tion, Pickering, on March 25, as secretary of war, and through 
the military committee of the House, submitted a plan for pro- 
viding a force to occupy the posts equal to that of the British 
garrisons then holding them, in order that the Indians might 
not take any advantage of the transfer. The temper of the 
House seemed likely to render any such j^rovision unnecessary, 
and before long it was known that Dorchester had ceased his 
preparations for evacuating, pending the uncertain fate of the 
treaty. 

The House accordingly became the centre of interest, and 
here, at last, the question of peace or war was to be decided. 
The friends of the treaty set seriously to work, and felt the bur- 
den which was upon them. They had a good deal to help them 
in the obvious and close connection between Jay's treaty and that 



FISHER AMES. 481 

which had been made with S^jain for the opening of the Mis- 
sissippi, hiter to be considered. The two treaties must stand 
or fall together. This feeling began to show itself beyond 
the mountains. Gallatin, whose connection with the whiskey 
rebellion in western Pennsylvania had been equivocal, to say 
the least, now, as representing the regenerated western spirit, 
showed a moderation which did much to restore confidence and 
l)laee him in the forefront of his party. The great triumph, 
however, was won by Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts federalist, 
in a speech before the House on April 28, whose effect is kept 
alive even to-day among the grandchildren and great-grand- 
children of those who heard it, and witnessed its effect through- 
out the land. Rochefoucault-Lianeourt, who saw the contem- 
porary influence of the speech, said : " It is, by men of his party 
from one end of the continent to the other, extolled as a piece 
of elocpience, which Demosthenes or Cicero woidd have found 
it difficult to equal," in taking a " dexterous advantage " of the 
attending circumstances. 

When Ames took the floor, he felt with others that the oppo- 
nents of the treaty were sure to carry their measure by a major- 
ity of two or three certainly, and perhaps by one of four or five. 
How he turned defeat into a victory, some extracts from his 
speech will show, but they will of course lack his impassioned 
voice, his finished elocution, and the tenderness which came of 
his palpable feebleness, nerving itself to a duty, at the risk of 
his life. It will be remembered that as an eastern man he had 
been thought to share that indifference towards the west which 
was often charged upon New England. 

" Will it be whispered that the treaty has made me a new 
champion for the protection of the frontiers ? It is known that 
my voice, as well as my vote, has been uniformly given for the 
ideas I have expressed. Protection is the right of the frontiers ; 
it is our duty to give it. . . . The western inhabitants are not 
a silent and uncomplaining sacrifice. The voice of humanity 
issues from the shades of the wilderness. It exclaims that while 
one hand is held up to reject the treaty, the other grasps a 
tomahawk. ... I retort especially to the convictions of the 
western gentlemen, whether, supposing no posts and no treaty, 
the settlers will remain in security. . . . No, sir, it will not be 
peace, but a sword ; it will be no better than a lure to draw 



482 J ATS TREATY'. 

victims within the reach of the tomahawk. ... If I could find 
words for m}^ emotions, I woukl swell my voice to such a note 
of remonstrance, it should reach every log house beyond the 
mountains. . . . Wake from your false security. You are a 
father, — the blood of your sons shall fatten your cornfields. 
You are a mother, — the warwhoop shall waken the sleep of 
the cradle." 

••' The refusal of the posts, inevitable if you reject the treaty, 
is a measure too decisive in its nature to be neutral in its con- 
sequences. From great causes we are to look for great effects. 
The price of western lands will fall. Settlers will not choose 
their habitations on a field of battle. . . . Vast tracts of wild 
lands will almost cease to be property. This loss will fall upon 
a fund expressly devoted to sink the national debt." 

" The treaty alarm is purely one addressed to the imagina- 
tion and prejudices. Objections that proceed upon error in 
fact or calculation may be traced and exposed. But such as 
are drawn from the imagination, or addressed to it, elude defini- 
tion and return to domineer over the mind. . . . On a question 
of shame and honor, reason is sometimes useless and worse. I 
feel the decision in my pulse ; if it throws no light Upon the 
brain, it kindles a fire at the heart." 

Ames spoke in a committee of the whole, and the body at 
once adjourned to avoid the immediate effect of the speech, 
which seemed to be overwhelming, though the cool rehearsal of 
some of its warmer passages fails of much effect now. Later, 
after the feelings were quieted, the committee were a tie, but 
the vote of the chairman sent it to the House, where, on April 
30, the House gave the majority that Ames had despaired of 
acquiring in a vote of 51 to 49. The contest was over, and 
early in May the appropriation bill became a law. 

On May 10, 1796, McHenry, the secretary of war, sent 
Captain Lewis to make arrangements with Dorchester for the 
transfer of the posts, and on May 27 Wilkinson, now com- 
manding at Fort Greeneville, asked of the commander at De- 
troit the day wlien the American forces could enter that town. 

At the end of May, orders were issued to the British com- 
mandants to evacuate the posts ; but Lewis, now in Quebec, 
representing that the American troops were not yet ready for 



THE POSTS EVACUATED. 483 

the occupation, Dorchester agreed to wait their coming-, and on 
June 1 and 2 issued orders accordingly. A few weeks later 
(July 9), that governor, who had been so long an actor in 
American history, embarked for England, and was succeeded 
three days later by Lieutenant-General liobert Prescott. 

The British had already reduced their garrisons to a guard. 
On July 11, 179G, Fort Miami was handed over to Colonel 
Hanitramck. On the same day, Captain Moses Porter entered 
Detroit, and found it already evacuated. Some one had filled 
the well at the fort with stones, and had done other damage. 
Simon Girty is known to have stayed behind, after the British 
had crossed the river, and just in time to avoid the Americans 
he rushed his horse into the stream, and swam to the other 
side. Porter was so poorly supplied that, to maintain himself 
till succored, he was obliged to borrow provisions from the 
British beyond the river. 

Oswego was left on the 15th. The American troops under 
Captain James Bruff, bound for Niagara, were delayed on the 
wa}^ and wdien that fort was turned over, on August 11, nearly 
all the British garrison had left. It was not till October that 
JVIajor Burbeck with a party, sent from Detroit, reached jNIacki- 
nac, where a British officer and twenty men pulled down the 
last English Hag on American territory. Wayne, in June, 
had been ordered to supervise the several surrenders. In No- 
vember, when all was done, and he could congratulate himself 
on the natural sequel of the Fallen Timbers, he left Detroit for 
PresquTsle. When he reached there, he was prostrate with an 
agonizing attack of gout, and on December 15 he died at that 
post ; and James Wilkinson — of all men — succeeded to his 
commanding station. 

The determination of the Biitisli government to surrender the 
posts had struck deeply into the heart of Sinicoe. We learn of 
his "displeasure," of his vindictive plotting with the Indians, 
and of his unbridled passion, " which overleaped all bounds 
of prudence and decency," in the talks which Rochefoucault- 
Liancourt reports having had with the governor, not long after, 
when that traveler visited Canada. Pie disclosed to that visitor 
his hopes of regaining some of the prestige which Jay's treaty 
had taken from Canada by developing a profitable corn trade, 
and by opening a route for the fur traders from Ontario to 



484 JAY'S TREATY. 

Lake Huron, avoiding tliat by Lake Erie, and diverting trade 
from the United States. He was confident that the Genesee 
County must pour out its produce to the sea by way of the St. 
Lawrence. He looked forward to an inevitable war with the 
Americans, and dreamed of a naval station at Chatham on the 
Thames. Fortunately, his heated temper was cooled by a dash 
of Dorchester's soberer sense. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

Wayne's treaty and the new northwest. 

1794-1797. 

We need now to look back. It seemed for a while in the 
autumn of 1794 as if Wayne and his army might have to take 
part in the unwelcome task of quelling civil commotion in west- 
ern Pennsylvania. Had he been called to it, his work of paci- 
fication beyond the Ohio might have been seriously retarded. 

The funding policy of Hamilton had necessitated legislation 
to support it, and, in 1791, a tax had been imposed on whiskey. 
Certain concessions quieted the opjDosition to such a tax, which 
api)eared in Virginia and North Carolina, but the population 
of Pennsylvania beyond the mountains, centring about Pitts- 
burg, which had now begun rapidly to grow, were not to be 
satisfied by anything short of an absolute exemption. Their 
surplus grain, as Gallatin set forth for them in a manifesto, in 
view of their remote situation, only became transportable at a 
profit when it had passed the still ; and a tax which was laid on 
them, and did not burden equally the seaboard, was an unjust 
one. These views, as Fisher Ames said, " had tainted a vast 
extent of country beside Pennsylvania." 

An organized revolt began at Kedstone on the Monongahela, 
in July, 1791, when, at a conference of distillers, the populace 
was excited, and officers sent to collect the tax were hustled 
and seized. When this was known, the government found a 
strong feeling developed elsewhere in support of law. " The 
wild men of tlie back country," wrote Wolcott, " will not have 
perseverance to oppose the steady, uniform pressure of law, and 
must finally submit." 

This over-mountain po])ulation was a ragged one, and had 
some passionate blood in it. Wolcott, referring to a ]>repon- 
derance of Irish and Scotch-Irish among them, said : " It is a 
specimen of what we are to expect from European emigrants." 



486 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

We have not yet got over such feelings. The leaders, insti- 
gated by the rancorous language which they heard, and perhaps 
somewhat alarmed at the determined support which the gov- 
ernment was receiving on the seaboard, sent agents to Ken- 
tucky to secure sup})ort. It was said that their emissaries were 
dispatched to Canada for like purposes, and sjiies among them 
reported that there were Englishmen among their leaders. They 
were known to rob the mails in order to secure information. 
They might reasonably expect that dispatches would be sent to 
Wayne touching their actions, and warning him of possibilities. 
In his cabinet Washington first experienced the discpiietude of 
Randolph and his lack of trust, when that member of it urged 
him to inactivity. Hamilton, on the contrary, counseled prompt 
and uncompromising force. During it all. Governor Mifflin 
was timid. In the summer of 1794, while the government was 
anxiously waiting news from Wayne and Jay, disturbing reports 
were continually coining from over the mountains. At inter- 
vals of seven weeks (August 7 and September 25), Washington 
issued two proclamations, warning the rioters of the conse- 
quences of their folly. Meanwhile he was collecting militia 
from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 
October, the President himself joined the camp at Carlisle, 
and arrangements were made for entering the insurgent coun- 
try through the mountain passes. General Collot, who a little 
later went over the ground, with his French feelings in sym- 
pathy with any disturbance that could make America turn to 
Fraiace, criticised the indecision of the insurgent chiefs, in that 
they neglected the opportunity of blocking the progress of the 
federal army by preoccupation of the defiles. But time had 
given a chance for passions to cool, and Washington, at the 
head of the approaching troops, disturbed the equanimity of 
the defiant hordes, and they sent a deputation to make terms. 
The President was struck with their subdued bearing, and the 
end came. Morgan was left for the winter with a body of two 
thousand five hundred men to be ready for any revival of the 
rebellious spirit, and Washington returned to his official duties 
to be prepared for other trials in the spring, when Jay's treaty 
darkened the atmosphere once more. 

It is a curious commentary on the heated politics of the time, 
when we find Fauchet believing, with how much of Eandolph's 



A TRUCK 487 

countenance we may nevei- know, that tlie government had 
instiii'ated the revolt to divert the attacks which were makino- 
on it, and when Washington himself saw in the rebellion " the 
first formidable fruit of the democratic societies, brought forth 
too prematurely for their own views, which may contribute to 
the overthrow of them." Whatever the case, the timely sup- 
pression of the trouble left Wayne at Greeneville at liberty to 
devote himself to the pacification which it was his mission to 
accomplish. 

The opening of 1795 showed a disposition on the part of an 
increasing number of the northwest Indians to sue for peace ; 
but in Philadelphia the hope of a permanent settlement was 
not so sanguine. Pickering felt, with many others, that the 
disturbance in western Pennsylvania was rather quieted than 
quelled, and that there was no certainty as yet in the outcome 
of Jay's mission. Its failure meant war at no distant day. So 
he urged the maintenance of strong advanced posts in the In- 
dian country, to be ready for any disastrous turn of affairs. 
Later news from Wayne was more assuring. By February 11, 
he had come to a preliminary agreement with the Shawnees, 
Delawares, and Miamis, and on the 22d he issued a proclama- 
tion announcing a cessation of hostilities. Wayne, buoyed by 
his satisfaction, neglected a duty in not communicating the fact 
of such a proclamation to St. Clair, who was still the civil gov- 
ernor of the northwest. That official only heard of it near 
the end of April, in a letter from Pickering, and he properly 
made complaint to the President. 

Although there was a truce, there was still uncertainty, and 
further pacification was jeopardized by the incursions which 
some Kentuckians made across the river, throwing the Indians 
into a suspicious frame of mind. The less sanguine doubted if 
more than half the great body of the Indians were weaned 
from war, especially if they could be made to feel by the Eng- 
lish agents that they would be helped in further resistance. 
The English, however, were themselves uneasy, and the French 
in Detroit were exciting the apprehensions of Simcoe, and were 
known to be urging the Indians to peace. Already their trad- 
ers were sending supplies to Wayne, and rumors of the comple- 
tion of a treaty in London, with the surrender of the posts 



488 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

assured, were raising in French circles an expectation of large 
accessions to their numbers from France itself. In March, 
Simcoe had written to Portland that Wayne threatened to place 
a garrison in Sandusky. This again added to Simcoe's alarm 
as hazarding British supremacy on the lakes. Brant and 
McKee were actively at work to counteract French influence 
with the Indians ; and Brant was later to feel that nothing- 
could prevent Wayne concluding a peace. By June, Wayne 
felt that the only impediment to a treaty was the continued in- 
cursions of the lawless Kentuckians, and appealed to St. Clair 
to prevent them. Parties of red men had now begun to assem- 
ble round his camp, and he gave them his first talk on the 16th. 
By the middle of July, the concourse was large enough for 
formal proceedings. On the 20th, he read to them the treaty 
of Fort Harmar, and found that some of the remoter tribes had 
never heard of it. Little Turtle made a declaration for the 
Miamis about the territory which they claimed. He said that, 
beginning at Detroit, their boundary line stretched to the head 
of the Scioto, followed down that river and the Ohio to the 
Wabash, and pursuing this last stream, extended to the Chi- 
cago portage, — an area embracing the westerly half of Ohio, 
nearly all of Indiana, and the lower Michigan peninsula. 
Wayne, in reply, thought that other tribes than the Miamis 
had rights in this territory, and said that the United States 
were prepared to pay for such part of it as should be surren- 
dered by the treaty. We may now follow the daily progress 
of the negotiation : — 

July 23. At the end of the day Wayne gave them some 
liquor, but warned them " to keep their heads clear to attend to 
what I shall say to-morrow." 

July 24. Wayne told them that the " fifteen fires," as they 
called the Union of States, had paid twice for land, once at 
Fort Mcintosh ten years ago, and again at Fort Harmar six years 
since. He also told them that he asked for certain reservatians 
for posts farther west than the main cession. He read Jay's 
treaty to them, showing how the Americans were soon to take 
possession of the lake posts. He told them they might rest to- 
morrow and have a double allowance of liquor because the 
hatchet was buried, and on the following day he would let them 
know what he demanded for bounds. 



V 



THE TREATY MADE. 



489 



July 27. Wayne read his proposed treaty and enumerated 
the remote reservations which he wanted, merely "• to connect 
the settlements and the people of the United States " by roads 
which the Americans could travel. He described these distant 
posts as not intended to annoy the Indians, but simply to fur- 
nish convenient trading places ; and he explained that they 



/ V i 




[Colonel Whittlesey's plan of the divisionary grants in Ohio, from the Wrstern Reserve His- 
foiical Society's Tract, No. Gl (1884).] 

were all in the main such areas as the Indians had conveyed to 
the French, who in turn, in 1763, had surrendered them to the 
English, and by the English they were, in 1782, confirmed to 
the United States. 

July 28. There were numerous Indian comments upon 
Wayne's propositions. 

July 29. The Sandusky Indians presented a written memo- 



490 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

rial, asking" that what was conceded to the Indians might be 
granted in severalty to the different tribes. This was followed 
by some uneasy harangues on the part of the Indians in discon- 
tent at Wayne's demand for the remote reservations. 

'f/u/t/ 30, Wayne declined the proposition of the Sandusky 
tribe, and then addressed himself particularly to the Miamis, 
wlio alone had objected to his main line, as interfering with 
tlieir hunting-grounds. Wayne firmly stood by his expressed 
demand, and told them they could hunt where they pleased, 
" as long as they demeaned themselves peaceably." After some 
further explanations, he read the treaty again, and put the 
question : ^ Do you approve these articles ? " All answered 
one b)"" one, " Yes," — Ottawas, Pottawattamies, Wyandots, 
Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis, Chippewas, Kickapoos, Weas, 
and the Eel River tribe. 

Tlie conference now broke up " to eat, drink, and rejoice," 
and to reassemble when the necessary copies of the treaty were 
engrossed. 

On August 3, the tribes again assembled. Wayne once more 
read his commission, giving him power to treat with them, and 
went over the treaty for the last time. He then handed a parch- 
ment copy to the Wyandots, to be kept for the whole, and a 
paper copy to each tribe. The next day the presents were dis- 
tributed, — f 20, 000 worth of goods, with a promise of an annu- 
ity of $9,500. As a last word he told them they were children, 
and no longer brothers. 

The line which had been agreed upon, and which Ludlow 
later marked, gave the whites some 25,000 square miles of ter- 
ritory east and south of it, and between it and the Ohio. It 
began at a point on the latter river opposite the mouth of the 
Kentucky, and ran northerly, so as to include a long gore at 
the southeast corner of Indiana, to Fort Recovery. Here it 
turned east and was extended to the upper Muskingimi, whence 
it followed the portage and the Cayahoga to Lake Erie. The 
reservations west of this line were sixteen in number, and meas- 
ured each a few miles square. Those which were wrung from 
the Indians with most difficulty were that at Fort Wayne and 
that at the portage of the Maumee and Wabash near by. These 
parcels of land were the beginning of cessions which half a 
century later drove the Miamis beyond the Mississippi. A 



THE INDIAN WAR AT AN END. 491 

reservation at the mouth o£ the Chicago Kiver was six miles 
square, *•' where a fort formerly stood," probably a trading-post 
of the French, and where now stands the city of Chicago, which 
was begun the next year by a St. Domingo negro, Jean Bap- 
tiste Pont an Sable, who built a hut on the spot. The grant 
which Virginia had made to George Rogers Clark, o])posite 
Louisville, was also reserved. Some of these detached cessions 
were at later dates included in larger grants, made by other 
treaties. The recognition by the United States of the Indian 
property in the soil, even though practically salable to the 
States under something like compulsion, was perhaps some re- 
compense to the tribes for the English transfer to the Americans 
of the right of preemption, by the treaty of 1783, without the 
concurrence of the original owners ; but the Indians on their 
part were now required to recognize this right as lodged in the 
Americans only. 

A distribution of commemorative medals was made on Au- 
gust 8, and on August 10, when the last conference was held, 
it was found there were 1,130 Indians present. A band of 
Cherokees settled on the upper waters of the Scioto had kept 
aloof. When, however, Wayne sent them a summons, they 
obeyecU it, and promised to move back to their own countr}^ 
south of the Ohio. 

Tidings of these events were dispatched to St. Clair, and at 
Cincinnati, on August 25, 1795, he made proclamation that the 
Indian war was over. 

The only drawback to Wayne's content was the fear that the 
turmoil in the House of Representatives over the treaty of Jay 
might end in its practical rejection, and on September 15 he 
wrote to Pickering that if the posts were not repossessed, as the 
London treaty provided, it " would have a powerful effect upon 
the Indian mind." Of the treaty which Wayne had effected, 
Washington said that "' the adjustment of the terms and the 
satisfaction of the Indians were deemed an object no less of the 
policy than of the liberality of the United States," — a proposi- 
tion, it must be observed, that McKee severely questioned, when 
he insisted that Wayne had made provisions in articles that 
were not commvniicated to the Indians. The source of this 

Note. — The map on the following pages is "A Map of the Northwestern Territory," iu Jed- 
ediah Moore's The American Univemal Geography, p. 573, Boston, June, IVOfi. "The dotted 
squares are the reservations made by the Indians iu 1795, and ceded to the United States." 



V^ 




American JWiiiv 



Oenitrte-ve. 



< 



^ 0111 wc 



s» too tso too 



7>/'€7vAfa drid 



494 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 




^ ^-^uir. 




ST-Anil»« 



allegation diminishes its chances of truth. 
There was one outcome of the treaty, in 
which some reckless Americans joined, not 
Jess discreditable than the action charged 
by McKee, could this charge have been 
jDroved. Certain Michigan tribes, known 
to be aggrieved at the result, were cajoled 
by some Canadian merchants to make for 
a supposable half a million dollars the 
transfer of some twenty million acres in the 
lower Michigan peninsula. It was the part 
of the American sharers in the plot, led 
by one Robert Randall of Philadelphia, to 
obtain Congressional sanction by bribing 
members with the promise of a due propor- 
tion in the plunder, Randall's effrontery 
and the testimony of William Smith of 
South Carolina, who had been approached 
late in 1795, led to. his arrest, and for his 
attempted bribery the speaker reprimanded 
him, and the project dropped. 

In December, 1795, Washington, on meet- 
ing Congress, advised them of the treaty as 
securing " a durable tranquillit3^" It had 
indeed put an end to forty years of warfare 
in the valley of the Ohio, in which it had 
been reckoned that 5,000 whites had been 
either killed or captured. For three years 
past, if Hamilton's figures can be taken, 
these wars had cost a million a year. 
What had been charged sj^ecifically to the 
Indian department for five years had va- 
ried annually from $13,000 to 127,000. At 
the conclusion of AVayne's treaty, the United 
States had bound itself to pay to the Six 
Nations, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, 
and the northwestern tribes, an aggregate 

yearly sum of $23,520, which attending charges would raise to 
$30,000. These expenses were irritating to those who had not 
experienced the evils of the frontier life ; but they bore a small 



SfC 



.A/^mii 



NORTHWEST TERRITORY. 



495 




[This map is from Joseph Scott's United States Gazetteer, Philadelphia, 1795.] 



proportion to the $7,000,000, which was now the annual expense 
of maintaining- the federal government. It was said that each 

Note. — The map on the following pages is from Rufiis Putnam's map of Ohio, and shows the 
Western Reserve and the reservations under Wayne's treaty. 



498 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

citizen paid towards this greater sum, per capita, but one fifth 
of the burden imposed on every European subject. 

It was not long before it became apparent that the tranquil- 
lity which Washington looked for was having its effect. The 
reign of civil content may have been irksome to a few, who, as 
one of them told Collot, sought the more distant West in order 
to escape " the plague of justice and law ; " but it gave allure- 
ment to others, and the immigration into the valley so increased 
that, during 1795-96, the population of the northwest was 
thought to have risen to about 15,000. 

The first settlement of any extent which the voyager down 
the Ohio found on the north bank was still that at Marietta. 
Jedediah Morse, the preacher at Charlestown, Massachusetts, 
who at this time was finding sales for repeated editions of his 
Gazetteer, speaks of the town's spacious streets, running at 
right angles, and its thousand house-lots, each 100 by 90 feet. 
Collot speaks of the surrounding landscape as " the most agree- 
able imaginable," with its stately trees, the tulip-tree and the 
magnolia and the climbing honeysuckle. He says the popula- 
tion consists of five or six hundred New England families and 
a few French who had straggled from Gallipolis. 

The same observer, going thence to this last-named " wretched 
abode " of his countrymen, found 140 people there, the " wreck 
of the Scioto Company." Congress, in some atonement of 
others' wrong-doing, had made them a grant of seven acres to 
each family ; but the land was so bad and unhealthy that Collot 
says it did not support them. To make further amends, in 
1796 Congress added 250 acres more to each family, and located 
the grants near the Little Scioto. 

In the country bordering on the Miami River, Cincinnati had 
grown to have 300 families, and, beside its log cabins, there were 
some fifteen frame houses. Collot thought the future of New- 
port, the hamlet across the river, was better assured than that 
of Cincinnati. Symmes had collected some families at the 
North Bend, and parties had gone up the Great Miami fifty 
miles, and settled Dayton. In all his disquietudes, St. Clair 
had found nothing so perplexing as the issuing by the land 
companies of divers warrants covering the same territory, and 
he charged the doings principally upon the irregularities of 
Symmes and Putnam, as managers of their speculative associa- 




1 g" 

? 3 



s -s 









500 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

tion. It was a further disturbance of his sense of justice that, 
having been the occasion of these disputes, " these gentlemen 
are allowed to sit in judgment upon them " in their courts. 

Upon the quieting of the country by the treaty of Greene- 
ville, the Scotch-Irish from the Pennsylvania counties along the 
New York line and from the west ranges had come into the 
valley in large numbers. A colony of Swiss settled at the mouth 
of the Great Scioto. Associates from Kentucky and Virginia 
had gone farther up that river. One Farley, a Presbyterian 
minister from Bourbon County in Kentucky, had gone in 1795 
up the stream with a party, and had a brush with some wander- 
ing Shawnees and Senecas, whom Wayne had not succeeded 
in drawing to Greeneville. Farley, finding the country to his 
liking, returned in 1796, and on April 1 built the first cabin 
at Chillicothe. 

Wayne's treaty line had thrown all east of the Cayahoga into 
the hands of the whites for settlement. This opened the east- 
erly part of that northern section of the State of Ohio claimed 
by Connecticut, and known as the Western Reserve. West of 
the Cayahoga line, Connecticut, as early as November, 1792, 
had set aside a large tract, known as the Firelands, to be devoted 
in due time to recompense the 1,870 claimants who had suf- 
fered from the British raids in Connecticut during the Revolu- 
tion. Wayne's treaty, by throwing this tract into the Indian 
reservation, had put off the occupation of it. 

A year later, Connecticut tried to sell the remaining parts of 
this property, but purchasers were not found till after Wayne's 
treaty had been made, when, in September, 1795, a number of 
Connecticut people, associating themselves, but without legal 
incorporation, as the Connecticut Land Company, bought the 
entire area, paying for it by a return mortgage for $1,200,000, 
— a sum the basis of the school fund in that State to-day. 
The principal agent in the enterj^rise was Oliver Phelps, who 
eight years before had been engaged with Gorham in a similar 
speculation in Genesee lands, — selling them to Robert Morris 
in 1790, and Morris represented !i!l68,000 of this new invest- 
ment. Six townships five miles square were at once sold to pay 
the cost of surveying, which was begun the same year. This 
plotting of townships was a departure from the plan of six miles 
square, which had already been established in the contiguous 



502 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

Seveu Ranges, and which became the rule. The proj^rietors are 
stated in some accounts to have been 35, and in others 48 in 
number, representing in the aggregate 400 shares at 153,000 each. 
Each member of the company drew his proportion by lot and 
held in severalty. The survey, when completed, showed less 
than 3,000,000 acres, when earlier, depending on an imperfect 
knowledge of the shore line of the lake, they had supposed they 
were bargaining for a third more, so that what they reckoned 
as costing 30 cents an acre was really purchased at 40 cents. 

The question of jurisdiction was still in abeyance. It was 
for a while uncertain if the company could not in due time make 
their territory a State of the Union. Congress took the matter 
under consideration in January, 1 796, but suspended action to 
1798, the region in the mean while being included by St. Clair 
in the counties laid out to the south of it. Movements now 
proceeded which were ended in 1800 by the United States 
giving a title of the territory to Connecticut, reserving the juris- 
diction, and that State transferred the title to the company. 

A party of fifty pioneers, representing the company, left 
Connecticut in May, 1796. Their leader was Moses Cleave- 
land, a militia general of good rejjute, who was black enough 
in visage and sturdy enough in figure to seem of a different 
stock from his Yankee followers. He led them by way of 
Fort Stanwix and Wood Creek to Lake Ontario, and avoided 
the fort at Oswego, still held by the British. Reaching Buffalo, 
the party bargained with Brant and Ked Jacket for the Indian 
title to the land beyond for 1^2,500 in merchandise. On July 
4, they were at Conneaut Creek, which, in recognition of the 
day, they named Port Independence, and made merry " with 
several pails of grog." From this point they sent out surveyors 
to determine the 41° of latitude, their southern line, and to 
establish the meridian which was the western bound of Penn- 
sylvania, from which their township ranges were to count. 
Next, passing on by the lake, the party kept on the lookout for 
the mouth of the Cayahoga, on the eastern side of which, and 
within Wayne's treaty limits, they were intending to found a 
town. One day they discovered a sharp opening into the land, 
witli a sand-bar and sj^reading water beyond. They passed the 
obstruction and, rowing along some marshes, found a spot where 
the Indians had evidently been accustomed to beach their canoes. 



THE OHIO ROUTE. 



603 




1/ f \^ 



[This is a spotion of a '• New and Correct Map of tlie Provinces of New York, New England 
and Canada," in The American Gazetteer^ vol. ii., London, 1762. It shows the route from tlieOhio 
through Cayahoga [Canahogue] to Sandusky, thence by water to Detroit [Fort Pontchartrain]. 
The curved dotted line, crossing Lake Erie, is the western boundary of Pennsylvania, as claimed 
and running parallel to the course of the Delaware, its eastern boundary.] 

beneath a sandbank eight feet high. Ascending this declivitj'^, 
they found a phiin, more or less wooded, stretching away inland 
for two or three miles, to what had been, in geologic times, the 



504 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

shelving edge of the hike. There had been in the neighbor- 
hood at some earlier day a few temporary huts, erected by white 
travelers, for the spot had formed one of the stations in the 
route between Pittsburg and Detroit. It was now, as was reck- 
oned, the twelfth township, counting from the Pennsylvania 
line, and in the seventh range above the 41°,^ — the site of the 
future Cleveland. Here, about the 1st of October, 1796, the 
new settlement took shape under the surveyor's stakes, with 
homestead lots on the lake, ten-acre lots farther back, and farms 
of a hundred acres still more distant, — the latter on the line 
in part of wliat is now the world-famous Euclid Avenue. The 
town grew slowly, for the sand-blocked river had proved mala- 
rious, and we may mark the stages of future development in the 
abandonment, in 1805, of the other bank of the river by the 
Indians, and the opening of the Ohio Canal in 1827. 

There is little doubt that the delay in determining the ques- 
tion of jurisdiction had much to do with discouraging settle- 
ment. While the matter was still pending, Winthrop Sar- 
gent, who supposed that St. Clair was absent, and that he was 
acting-governor, had, in August, 1796, set up Wayne County, 
to include that portion of the Reserve west of the Cayahoga, 
together with the Michigan peninsula, but the right to federal 
supervision was denied. Again, in July, 1797, St. Clair him- 
self included the eastern section in Jefferson County, with 
similar protests from the occupants to such an assumption of 
territorial jurisdiction. The title of the United States was 
assured, as we have seen, in 1800. 

The report which Hamilton had made on July 20, 1790, on 
a plan for disposing of the western lands, was little considered 
at the time, but now that the treaty of Greeneville had quieted 
the west, it was again brought np in Congress. There was at 
first some contention upon the provisions of the new bill, and, as 
one of the members of Congress wrote, its fate depended on the 
reconciling" crude schemes and local views." By the exertions 
of Gallatin and others, an act was finally passed, on May 18, 
1796, providing for the surveying of townships six miles square, 
and the selling of lands in sections. It was largely based on 
the act of 1785. Hamilton had advised putting the price at 
a dollar an acre ; but the act put the price at two dollars, and 



SALES OF PUBLIC LANDS. 



505 



sought to make some recompense to poorer people by allowing- 
a system of credit. The sales, however, were small, and within 
a year less than $5,000 was received into the public treasury, 




[The annexed map is from Josepli Scotfs United States Gazetteer, Philatlelpliia, 1795, — the 
earliest of such books.] 

and for forty years the expenses of maintaining the system 
exceeded the returns. The same act of 1796 created the office 
of Surveyor-General, and the appointment fell, in October, to 
liufus Putnam. There had been a tract set aside for paying 
the bounties for military service in the Revolution. This lay 
between the Scioto and the Seven Ranges, south of Wayne's 



506 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

treaty line and north of a line running in about the latitude 
of the city of Columbus. This was one of the regions now 
surveyed. 

The preparing of these western lands for sale and settle- 
ment had kejit alive the project of connecting the coast with the 
Ohio valley, which, under Washington's influence, had taken 
their earlier shape in the years following the close of the Revo- 
lutionary War. Rufus King wrote to Gouverneur Morris, in 
September, 1792 : ^ You hear of comjianies formed and forming 
in all the States for the improvement of our inland navigation, 
and thus the most distant lauds will become almost as valuable 
as those nearest to our markets." Hamilton said, in 1795, that 
" to maintain connection between the Atlantic and the western 
country is the knotty point in our affairs, as well as a primary 
object of our policy." 

For some years, a project of connecting the Hudson and the 
lakes had been the subject of discussion, and had elicited sundiy 
pamphlets. In March, 1792, a canal company had been incor- 
porated with this in view. The retention of the posts had kept 
the project in abeyance, and when Cleaveland, in 1795, had 
taken the route by Fort Stanwix to reach Ontario, he had fol- 
lowed what promised, it was then thought, to be the course of 
such a connection. The route this way was from New York by 
boat to Albany, by road to Schenectady, by boat to Utica and 
Oswego (except the portage at Fort Stanwix) ; then three days 
on Lake Ontario, a portage at Niagara, two days on Lake Erie 
to PresquTsle, portage to Le Boeuf, and the boat to Pittsburg. 
The distance thus computed was eight hundred and ninety-one 
miles, and more than twenty-two days were taken ; while land 
carriage from Philadelphia, three hundred miles, took eighteen 
or twenty days ; but a hundredweight of merchandise could be 
carried a little cheaper from New York. The Hudson route, 
however, had the disadvantage of being somewhat obstructed 
from July to October, when the streams were low. 

Nearly all the travel so far, however, had been by the over- 
mountain route from Philadelphia and Baltimore. It took 
forty days, sometimes increased to sixty days, for a wagon to 
go from either of these places to Pittsburg and return. Pitts- 
burg was now a town of about one hundred and fifty houses, 
brick and wood, and after Wayne's treaty had opened the way 



HECKE WELDER'S MAP. 



507 




[The above map is from a MS. map by Heckewelder (1790), reproduced in tlie Wi:ilern Reserve 
Hislorii-iU Sociehfs Tract, Xo. 114 (1884). It sliows the region north of I'itt.-sburg and the paths.] 

to an increased population down the Ohio valley, it beg'an to 
lose the characteristics of a frontier town, as the edge of the 
wilderness was pushed forward. 

The only turn])ike in the country was a macadam road that 
left Phihidel])hia and extended to Lancaster, a distance of sixty- 
six miles, and once a week a stag;e passed over this and on to >/ 
Harrisburg on the Susquehanna, as the main route in Pennsyl- 



508 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

vania to the mountain passes. While the distance from Phila- 
delphia to Pittsburg' in an air line was two hundred and seventy 
miles, the road extended it to three hundred and fourteen. 

For some years the route west by the Potomac had been 
improved by progressive canalizing- of that river. The land 
carriage from Fort Cumberland, which had been for some time 
about fifty miles, on to Redstone, was likely soon to be reduced 
to twenty miles. Further up the Potomac, from the mouth of 
Savage River, there was a trail to Cheat River, which people 
talked of reducing to seventeen miles. '' Produce from the 
Ohio," said Wansey, an English traveler at this time, " can be 
sent cheaper to Alexandria than English goods can be delivered 
in London from Northampton." The fur dealers said that 
Alexandria was four hundred miles nearer the Indian wilds 
than any other shipping port on the Atlantic. The route from 
Baltimore to the Ohio was increased from two hundred and 
twenty-four miles as the bird flies to two hundred and seventy- 
five by the course followed. In 1796, CoUot made some com- 
putations of the cost of carrying European products up the 
Mississippi as compared with the Potomac and other over- 
mountain routes. He found that it cost 36 per cent, more in 
charges and thirty-five days more in time by the land route to 
the middle west ; and if St. Louis was the objective port, 
the excess was 43 per cent, in cost. From New Orleans to the 
mouth of the Ohio was one thousand two hundred miles, and 
boats carrying twenty-five tons and managed by twent}'' men 
consumed ninety days in the round trip. It required ten days 
more, if St. Louis was the goal. Putting it another way, CoUot 
says that goods can be conveyed from Philadelphia to Kentucky 
at a cost of 33 per cent, on the value of the goods, and from 
New Orleans to Illinois at a charge of only 4 to 4.^ per cent. 

On the Ohio there was an almost incessant procession of flat- 
boats passing down with merchandise. In 1796, a thousand 
such craft passed Marietta. Every month a passenger boat 
left Pittsburg for Cincinnati. Its cabins were bullet proof, and 
six single-pounder guns were trailed over its gunwales. 

In 1794, while Pickering was acting as Postmaster-General, 
Rufus Putnam arranged with him for a regular mail service on 
the Ohio. The post-bags were carried by horsemen every 

Note. — The opposite map of routes west from Alexandria and Lancaster (Philadelphia) is from 
a map in La Rochefoucault-Liancourt's Travels, Loudon, 1799. 



-^ *?s 




^^w^ 



510 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

fortnight, from Pittsburg to Wheeling, which was now a town 
of twelve or fifteen frame and log houses, protected by a small 
stockaded fort. Here the mail was transferred to a boat, and, 
after stopping at Marietta and Gallipolis, the craft passed on 
to Limestone. This river port, which had long been used, was 
a hamlet built on a high and uneven bank at the foot of a con- 
siderable hill. Its hai'bor was the mouth of a small creek, 
where a few Kentucky boats were usually lying, and were occa- 
sionally broken up to furnish the plank for more houses. From 
Limestone the pouches were carried inland to the Kentucky 
settlements. In 1797, an overland route to Limestone was 
opened from Wheeling by Ebenezer Zane, in payment for six 
hundred and forty acres of land which Congress had granted 
him north of the Ohio. 

The mail boat, which was a vessel twenty-four feet long, 
manned by a steersman and four oarsmen, next passed on to 
Cincinnati. These boats, like the passenger ones, were armed 
against Indian attacks, but there was little or no interruption 
by savage marauders after 1794. It took six days to run from 
AVheeling to Cincinnati, being an average of sixty miles a day ; 
twice as much time was consumed in returning. 

The western country was at this time entered at three dif- 
ferent points, for the Niagara route had hardly become a 
commercial one, and since Pickering pacified the Six Nations 
at Canandaigua, in November, 1794, there had been obstacles 
to its occupancy. These three portals we^^e the sources respec- 
tively of the Ohio (Alleghany and Monongahela), Kanawha, 
and Tennessee. The routes converging upon these springs 
were seven in number. Two of them united at Pittsburg. 
One of these, starting from Philadelphia, struck by different 
portages the Alleghany River, which was a stream clearer and 
a little more rapid than the Monongahela, and its current in- 
creased from two and a half miles an hour to four or five, 
according to the state of the water. The other route, which 
ended at Pittsburg, left Baltimore or Alexandria and passed 
from the Potomac to the Monongahela. It was an attractive 
route. The river had firm banks, and was topped with a variety 
of trees, — buttonwood, hickory, oak, walnut, sugar-maple, and 
beech, — all growing to large sizes for their kind. Wherever 



THE WESTERN ROUTES. 



511 



the hills fell back from the stream, it was fringed by fertile 
bottoms. From Fort Cumberland by wagon to Brownsville 
was eighty miles, and the carrying distance was much less by 




Union 



PITTSBURG AND WHEELING. 



[From a "General Map of the Course of tlie Ohio from its Source to its Junction with the Mis- 
sissippi," in Collot's Atlas.'] 



poi'tages to the branches of the jVlonongahela. Rochefoucault- 
Liancourt says : " Being situated nearer the rivers Youghio- 
geny and Mocongahel [Alonongahela], Baltimore possesses a 
part of the trade of the back country, if Pennsylvania supi)lies 
most of the stores." 

The other routes from Virginia were to the head of Green- 



512 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

brier River aud so down the Kanawha to the Ohio ; and 
through Cumberland Gap, by the Wilderness Road, as Boone 
tracked it in 1775, using so much skill in avoiding the water- 
courses that the modern engineers liave put the railroad over 
much the same course. In 1795, the Virginia Assembly passed 
" an act o})ening a wagon road to Cumberland Gap," approj^ri- 
ating £2,000 to construct a way suitable for wagons carrying- 
loads of one ton ; and in the summer of 1795, large trains of 
emigrants were passing this way. 

The Virginia road to Knoxville passed the same way, without 
turning to the right at the Holston settlements as the Kentucky 
way did, and so went on to Nashville. This road was joined 
by another from North Carolina ; and at the French Broad 
River, it was united with still another road from South Caro- 
lina. The Georgia road left Augusta and fell into this route 
from South Carolina. 

The application of artificial power to the propulsion of boats 
was still a constant dream. Morse, in his Gazettee?^ thought it 
probable that " steamboats would be found of infinite service 
in all our extensive river navigation." In 1792, Earl Stanhope, 
in England, had contrived a duck's foot paddle, shutting with 
the forward motion and opening with the return, and he had 
driven it by steam. In the autumn of the same year, Ormsbee 
at Providence, in Rhode Island, moved a boat three or four 
miles an hour on the same principle, calling the motors goose 
feet. Robei't Fulton sought to suljstitute the sim})ler dipping- 
paddle. Two years later (1794), Samuel Moi'ey, a New Hamp- 
shire man, who had been experimenting since 1790, moved a 
boat with a stern wheel five miles an hour, from Hartford to 
New York, and in June, 1797, he propelled a side-wheel boat 
on the Delaware. Fitch, the earlier mover in this problem, who 
had gone, as we have seen, to England, had now returned to 
America, a believer in the screw propeller. Its ]>rinciple had 
first been pi'oposed by the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli in 
1752, and it is described by David Bushnell in a letter to Jeffer- 
son in 1787, showing how a submarine boat worked by a screw 
had been earlier used by him in an attempt to blow up a Brit- 

NoTE. — Tlie opposite map from Morse's Universal Geography, Boston, 1793, shows the concep- 
tion then prevailing of the interlocking waters of the Chesapeake, Lake Ontario, and the Ohio. 



614 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST. 

isli fifty-gun shijj in New York harbor. This side of the steam 
navigation problem had ah*eady engaged the attention of Watt, 
Franklin, Paucton, and others. In 1796, Fitch tried a screw 
propeller in a yawl, on a fresh-water pond in New York city, 
near where Canal Street now is. Moving to Kentucky, we 
find him still experimenting with a model boat, three feet long, 
on a creek near Bardstown. Here he died in 1799, and he is 
buried by the scene of his last efforts, near the banks of the 
Ohio. In 1798, Stevens was engaged, with the sympathy of 
Chancellor Livingston, Nicholas T. Roosevelt, and Isambard 
Brunei (the last an exiled French royalist and later famous 
in engineering work), in experimenting on steam propulsion on 
the Passaic River. He used a boat of thirty tons, and drew 
water from the bottom of the boat and expelled it astern. In 
this, and in the use of elliptical paddles, his efforts failed of 
success. So the century went out, with the dream of Cutler 
and Morse still unfulfilled. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

1791-1794. 

The year 1791 was one of hesitancy in the southwest. Con- 
gress, in February, had admitted Kentucky to the Uuion, but 
her actual entrance was set for June of the next year. Ver- 
mont was ahnost innnediately received, to adjust the balance of 
North and South. 

Zachary Cox had, in 1785, begun a settlement at the Muscle 
Shoals of the Tennessee Kiver (in northern Alabama), and early 
in 1791, Sevier and others of the ejected Fi'anklinites, under 
tlie authority of the Tennessee Company, made ready to occupy 
the country just south of the shoals, where Georgia, December 
21, 1789, had made that body a grant of 3,500,000 acres. Ru- 
mors of their purpose stirred the Cherokees, and there was 
danger of a general Indian outbreak. Knox early protested 
against the daring independence of the Tennesseeans, and the 
President warned them of the risks they ran. He told them 
that the federal government could not and would not protect 
them against the angry Indians. Nevertheless, the company 
advertised for settlers. The President now appealed to the 
Attorney-General to devise some remedy against such flagrant 
acts, for every new irritation of the southwestern tribes was 
sure to extend to their Spanish neighbors, with whom the gov- 
erinuent was still trying to settle the momentous question of the 
Mississippi. 

The convention of Nootka had relieved Spain of immediate 
apprehension of a war with England, and Miro was getting 
tired of the iui])roductive Kentucky intrigue. The federal gov- 
ernment was loath to stir the slumbering embers. While it 
had no purpose to press the vexed question to a rupture, it was 
but too conscious how any moment might awake the Spanish 
passions. In March, 1791, Jefferson wrote to Carmichael at 



616 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

Madrid that at any time such an " accident," as the seizure of 
American boats on the Mississippi, might "• put further parley 
beyond our power."' He at the same time thought to cahu the 
Kentucky discontent by writing to Innes that the government 
only awaited an opportunity to bring the Spanish negotiations 
to a point. " I can assure you of the most determined zeal of 
our chief magistrate," he said. " The nail will be driven as 
far as it will go peaceably, and further, the moment that circum- 
stances become favorable." On May 30, 1791, Innes wrote 
back to Jeiferson that such assurances "" have in a great meas- 
ure silenced our complaints." 

It was at the same time a question how far France could be 
depended upon to exert her influence on the Spanish ministers. 
Lafayette had assured Washington (June 6) that " France 
will do everything in her power to bring Spain to reason, but 
will have a difficult and probably unsuccessful task." Events 
in France, however, were moving too rapidly. 

On July 2, 1791, Governor Blount, who had already been 
authorized (August 11, 1790) to act, met the Cherokee chiefs 
on the Holston at White's Fort. Over five hundred families 
had of late years settled on lands guaranteed to the Cherokees 
by the treaty of Hopewell, and the purpose of the new treaty, 
which Blount hoped to make, was to bring these families within 
the jurisdiction of the whites. There was the usual dilatory 
diislomacy before the Indians finally consented to place them- 
selves under the protection of the United States. They agreed 
to allow the whites free use of the road across their territory to 
the more distant settlements, and promised that travelers upon 
it should not be molested, and that no harm should come to 
any one navigating the Tennessee. By the bounds that were 
determined along a winding and disjointed line, wliich was the 
source of later trouble, and which Ellicott was ordered to trace, 
the Cherokees abandoned much of the land which the whites 
had usurped. The treaty, in fact, confirmed the whites in the 
possession of all the Tennessee country, except a tract lying 
between the Holston and the Cumberland, and other regions 
lying either in the southeast or towards the Mississippi. In 

Note. — The opposite "Map of the Tennassee government by Genl. D Smith and others," is 
in Cureifs American Atlas, Pliiladelpliia, 1795. It shows tlie road connecting Knoxville going 
west with Nashville and going east with the Holston settlements. The Kentucky road is tlie 
dotted line which crosses the Clinch River going nortli. 



518 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

the autumn Congress ratified the treat3^ SjDanish intrigues, 
aimed to unite the southwestern tribes as a barrier against the 
Americans, prevented a like acceptance on the part of all the 
sections of the Cherokee tribes, and the more western settle- 
ments soon, as we shall see, suffered from savage marauders. 

On the spot where Blount had made the treaty he very soon 
laid out a town for his capital, and bearing in remembrance the 
secretary of war, it was named Knoxville. It was surveyed 
in sixty-four lots, priced at S|i800 each. In the autumn, the 
Knoxville Gazette was started (November 5), which did good 
service, at a little later day, in cherishing loyalty and keeping 
the Tennessee settlers pi'oof against the Jacobin fever. 

Of the conditions at this time along the Mississippi and in 
Florida, we fortunately have the impressions of an intelligent 
traveler, John Pope, who, in 1791, recorded his observations, 
as he descended the river in a boat whose crew — to show the 
diversity of life on the river — was made up of "■ one Irishman, 
one Anspacher, one Kentuckian, one person born at sea, one 
Virginian, and one Welchman." 

At New Madrid the Spanish commander complained that the 
governor at New Orleans did not sufficiently support him ; and 
to Pope his " excellent train of artillery " appeared to be the 
chief defense which he had. It was doubtful if, at this time, the 
entire Spanish force between the Gulf and St. Loiiis, and at a 
post on the Missouri, numbered more than two or three thou- 
sand men. As he drew near Natchez, Pope found the country 
" pretty thickly iidiabited by Virginians, Carolinians, Geor- 
s:ians, and some few strao-olers from the Eastern States." On 
the Bayou Pierre, an inlet from the river, thirty miles in length 
and twenty wide, he found a population "" coinjjosed generally 
of people who have moved and still continue to move in elevated 
stations." He describes Natchez as having about a hundred 
houses. The fort commands the river a mile up and two miles 
down, but on its "• back part it is pregnable to a dozen men." 
Going on board the barge of Gayoso, the governor of the town, 
he was regaled *' with delicious wines." He sjjeaks of Gayoso's 
" majestic deportment, softened by manners the most engaging 
and polite." Below Natchez he saw the " seat " of Mr. Ellis, a 
A^irginian, near which lay three large tobacco-boats unlaunched. 
After this, " slight, airy, whitewashed buildings become more 



McGILLIVRAY. 519 

common on the eastern side, and are in general occiipied by 
people from the United States." Then came " comitry seats," 
" beauteous farms, and elegant buildings." 

At New Orleans, now a town of less than six thousand in- 
habitants. Pope found that private adventurers from New York, 
Philadelphia, and Baltimore were carrying on a tolerable trade, 
and could undersell the natives, while making a hundred per 
cent, profit. Passing on to Pensacola, he says : " The upi)er 
and lower Creek nation trade at this place, where they are uni- 
formly imposed upon by a Mr. Panton, who has monopolized 
their trade. The poor Indians barter their deer skins at four- 
teen pence sterling per pound for salt at nine shillings sterling 
per bushel. Panton is part owner of the salt works on the 
island of Providence, and has brought the salt to Pensacola in 
his own bottoms at the average expense of about three pence 
jier bushel. I think his goods at Mobile, Pensacola, and St. 
Marks are usually vended at about five hundred per cent, on 
tlieir prime cost." 

From Pensacola, Pope, in the early summer of 1791, went 
inland to visit McGillivray, at his house on the Cousee Rivera 
five miles above its junction with the Tallapoosa, where together 
they form the Alabama. This half-breed chieftain had an upper 
plantation, six miles higher up the stream. Here the traveler 
found him superintending the erection of a log house with dor- 
mer windows, on the spot where McGillivray's father, a Scotch 
trader, had lived amid his apple-trees, which were still stand- 
ing. Pope describes this tall, spare, erect man, with his large 
dark eyes, sunk beneath overhanging brows, as showing signs 
of " a dissipation which marked his juvenile days and sapped 
a constitution originally delicate and feeble. He possesses an 
atticism of diction, aided by a liberal education, a great fund 
of wit and humor, meliorated by a perfect good nature and polite- 
ness." Pope describes his host's table as affording a generous 
diet, with wines and other aixlent spirits. He possessed, as 
other visitors showed, some fifty or sixty negro slaves, three 
hundred cattle, and a large stock of horses and lesser animals. 

McGillivray always protested that he did all he could to 
make his tribesmen carry out the treaty which he had made in 
New York, but that he failed by the intrigues of the Spaniards 
among his countr^^men. " This perpetual dictator," as Po})e 



520 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

calls him, " who in time of wai' sub-delegates a number of chief- 
tains for the direction of all military operations," soon passes 
out of our story, for, to anticipate a little, he contracted a fever 
at Mobile, where he was consulting with these same intriguing 
Spanish, and died at Pensacola, on February 17, 1793, and 
was buried in the garden of that William Panton who, with 
McGillivray's own connivance, had unmercifully bled his fel- 
low-tribesmen. 

The year (1791) closed with a change in the control at New 
Orleans. Miro had left, and on December 30 he was succeeded 
by Carondelet, who had been transferred from the governorship 
of San Salvador, in Guatemala. It was not long before the inev- 
itable and irrepressible intrigue of the Spanish nature began to 
show itself in the influence which Carondelet exerted on those 
of the Cherokees who were discontented with the recent treaty. 
Reports were coming to Blount of intended inroads upon the 
Cumberland settlements, and he cautioned Robertson to be on 
his guard, and to prevent any provocations on the part of the 
whites. The federal government, meanwhile, tried, by increas- 
ing their subsidy from $1,000 to $1,500, to appease the recal- 
citrant Cherokees by a supplementary treaty at Philadelphia 
in February, whither an Indian delegation had gone. The sav- 
ages were well received by Knox, and the President wrote to the 
governor of South Carolina, where there had been some dis- 
content manifested at the enforced moderation of the federal 
government, that he looked for good results among the other 
southern Indians from this conciliatory reception of the Chero- 
kees. It was deemed in Philadelphia a fortunate occurrence 
that these southern tribesmen were so acceptably engaged in 
that city when news of St. Clair's defeat was received there, for 
otherwise the ill tidings might have aroused the Indians along 
the southern border. Although the Cherokees had returned in 
a friendly mood, and Blount had been led to hope for peace, 
there was still small confidence in the Cumberland region that 
the amicable humor of the Indians would last long, after the 
discouraging tidings from the Ohio country were given time to 
produce an effect. Accordingly, Robertson was urged by the 
settlers to prepare for the worst. In May, 1792, though Blount 
had confidence " in the black paint sprinkled with flour " which 
the Cherokees wore in token of good intention, the governor 



BOWLES AND MCGILLIVRAY. 521 

yielded to Robertson's apprehensions, and ordered out two 
companies of militia to protect the frontiers, but with injunctions 
not to cross the Indian frontiers. In the same month, Robert- 
son himself was wounded by prowling- savages while at work 
on his farm, and the danger seemed serious. Some of these 
marauders were Delawares from beyond the Mississippi, and 
when Robertson complained of them to the commander at New 
Madrid, he was told that the Spanish authorities could not be 
responsible for vagrant savages of the Spanish jurisdiction, if 
they went beyond their reach. 

Matters, to those who were in the secret, were, at the same 
time, far from satisfactory for the Spanish governor. The influ- 
ence of Bowles, as a rival among the tribes of McGillivray, was, 
to the mind of Carondelet, dangerous enough for him to arrest 
his sway by treachery. That renegade was accordingly invited 
to New Orleans, only to be ap2)rehended and sent a })risoner 
to Spain. If McGillivray, in whose loyalty Carondelet had 
confidence, had thus got rid of an enemy, he was too conscions 
of his own waning ascendency among his people not to seize 
eagerly an opportunity, which the Spanish governor offered 
him, of leadership in a new confederation of the Indians. With 
characteristic duplicity, he was, at the same moment, flattering 
Blount with a promise of leading two thousand Creeks to a 
conference with American agents. 

As the summer went on, James Seagrove, the Indian agent 
of the government, made clear to the authorities at Philadel- 
l)hia what he called the "simplicity and treachery" of McGilli- 
vray, and was in turn instructed to countermine that chief tain's 
influence with the Creeks. The complicity of the Spanish in 
all this was everywhere believed among the whites, and it was 
a (iu(\stion if the Spanish governor should not be told that this 
intriguing with the Creek leader could not be longer borne. 

At Mobile, whose defense Carondelet thought of more impor- 
tance than that of Pensacola, the Spaniards held Foi't Charlotte, 
and there was another armed station at Pensacola. Their mili- 
tary occupation extended up the Tombigbee, and near their 
Fort Stephen, on that river, a body of English-speaking settlers 
were engaged in raising indigo. These constituted the outpost 
of Spanish influence, and not a white man was permanently 
settled between them and the Cumberland remon. Plere roamed 



522 



THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 



the Creeks, and in the early summer of 1792, it was known 
that Spanish emissaries were passing- among these Indians and 
inciting them against the Americans, rendering it difficult for 
Ellicott to make any progress in running the treaty line of the 
previous year. There were also reports of Spanish traders 




THE CHICKASAW COUNTRY. 

[From a Chart of the Sources of the Mobile and the Eiver Yazoo. The Boar River is a branch 
of the Tennessee. The letter D stands for " carrying-place three miles only in length to join tlie 
Tennessee and Mobile Rivers."] 

trafficking on American soil. These stories reaching- Philadel- 
phia, Jefferson, in September, 1792, urged Washington to 
authorize counter movements on Spanish soil. 

The Spanish posts at Natchez and at Chickasaw Bluff had 
no such protection from barrier tribes, for the Chickasaws were 
more or less friendly with tlie Cumberland people, who were 
likely, as the Spaniards felt, to attack those posts. Feuds 
were arising- between the Chickasaws and the Creeks, and, in 
case of a Spanish war, it seemed likely those tribes would be on 
different sides. With this in view, the Spanish governor had, 
on May, 14, 1792, brought together representatives of the 



THE KENTUCKY CONVENTION. 523 

southern Indians, to bring a))out, if possible, an alliance with 
them, so as to make them breast the American advances. When 
these inimical steps were brought to the attention of the Span- 
ish agent in Philadelphia, he told Jefferson that the conditions 
naturally arose from the disputes of jurisdiction, and from the 
umbrage which the Indians generally felt because some had put 
themselves under American protection. 

Almost sinuiltaneous with this Spanish treaty, Blount had 
once more met the Cherokees. Little Turtle, their spokesman, 
expressed dissatisfaction because the line which Ellicott was 
running was going to cut off their hunting-grounds. In the 
conference, no farther immunity was made certain than that 
Blount and Pickens and their party, descending the river to 
Nashville to hold a conference with the Chickasaws and Choc- 
taws, would not be molested. By September, 1792, it was 
feared that war had not been prevented, and Blount was ready 
to let Robertson forestall an attack from the Cherokee towns 
by marching against them, when it was learned the hostile pur- 
pose was dropped. This professed forbearance was apparently 
a ruse to disarm the settlers, foi", on September 30, six hundred 
Chickamaugas and Creeks dashed upon Buchanan's Station, 
and brought war to the settlers' doors. For all this, Blount 
required Robertson to maintain the defensive, and to wait for 
Congress to declare a war. The brigadier-general of the east- 
ern posts, Sevier, had little faith in defensive war, and when 
Blount ordered out the AVatauga militia to protect Ellicott, — 
who was so far favoring the Indians as to leave some of their 
villages on the Indian side which the treaty line placed with 
the whites, — there was likelihood of a general war, if Sevier's 
dash prevailed. 

While the Tennessee region was suffering this uncertainty, 
tlie movement in Kentucky for Statehood had resulted, in April, 
1792, in a convention at Danville, to frame a constitution. 
This was the tenth coming together of the people in their long 
striving after autonomy, in which they had shown a marked 
steadiness in the face of excitement. Though so near the end, 
the soberer members found still some ground for alarm, and 
Innes expressed their doubts when he declared some uneasi- 
ness at the disposition shown to put the work of constructing 



lEn/rriaf-d. far 7m2ayj- Jn\ 




Tuhlished Fcb:''i.i-;p-!, .by J.D 



Xfricsn, Tbpe^aptvy . 



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.30 



British Scsuute MiUj 



^ 72 




trtt, PiictidUly. London 



T.Cuiuier SriUp 



528 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

their fundamental law too exclusively into the hands of " plain, 
honest farmers." The draft presented to the convention was 
the work of George Nicholas, the representative of the newer 
comers, rather than of the older leaders of the territory. The 
instrument followed on broad lines the Federal Constitution, 
but made the principle of government a little more democratic. 
It gave manhood suffrage, but gave no recognition of public 
education. Though allowing the possibility of emancipation, it 
saved slavery by declaring '' all men, when they form a social 
compact, equal." This constitution was ratified in May, and 
Isaac Shelby was made the first governor. 

Kentucky, " more extravagantly described than any other 
part of the United States," as one observer said, was commonly 
thought at this time to contain perhaps seventy thousand whites, 
and, when the blacks were included, the over-confident carried 
the population much higher. In the boastful talk about forcing 
the Mississippi, it was not infrequently held that there were 
thirty thousand men in the new State capable of bearing arm's. 
There is no doubt that the Spanish stood in dread of some 
ebullition of passion which would hurl a large force against 
their settlements on the Mississippi, and the Kentuckians were 
spoken of, in connection with the Cumberland settlers, as " rest- 
less, poor, ambitious, and capable of the most daring enter- 
prises," and Carondelet was fearful of their ultimate attempts 
to cross the Mississippi. In Kentucky, more than in Tennessee, 
the population was being tempered by the arrival of some gentle 
Virginian stock among them, and was passing out of the in- 
choate roughness of a pioneer condition, though, up to a very 
recent time. Cooper, the ti-aveler, was probably right in saying 
that no part of Kentucky, except a few miles round Lexington, 
was perfectly safe from Indian raids. The victory of Wayne 
was rapidly having its effect, in rendering the Wilderness Road 
safe without a mounted guard, and little was beginning to be 
heard of assaults on the armed packet-boats of the Ohio. 

It was estimated that the emigration from the settled por- 
tions of the States east of the mountains to the west was be- 
come from forty to fifty thousand a year ; but Kentucky was 
not getting now the share of it which she formerly did. The 

Note. — The opposite map, following Elihu Barker's large map of Kentucky, is from C(irey\s 
American Atlas, Philadelphia, 1705. and -shows the road connections of Frankfort, Danville, and 
Lexington with the Ohio and Cumberland rivers. 



.Port WasSn 




528 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

confusion of land titles through overlapping grants and shiftless 
recording was doing nnieh to repel the thrifty farmer. Larger 
bodies of emigrants went by the northern routes and stopped 
in the Genesee country, where perhaps the climate was not so 
inviting, but the soil was nearly as rich, and there were better 
means of taking produce to market. The opposition of New 
York laws to aliens holding lands was working, however, sonxe 
detriment to settlement within its borders. The enteri)rise of 
Pennsylvania in opening roads and canals, and bringing new 
regions in the valley of the Susquehanna into occupancy, was 
another impediment to Kentucky's increase. The treaty of 
Greeneville in quieting the northwest was, moreover, bringing 
the region north of the Ohio into direct rivalry. 

Kentuck}^, nevertheless, still had great advantages in rich and 
enduring soil. Everywhere the winter rotted the autumn's 
leaves, and in the spring there was clean turf beneath the 
trees. A Kentucky farmer, with perhaps pardonable warmth, 
told William Priest that he was obliged to plant his land six 
or seven years with hemp or tobacco before it was sufficiently 
poor to bear wheat. Grass grew with a surprising rankness. 
Clover grazed the horses' knees as they galloped through a sea 
of blossoms. Oaks, locusts, and beeches spread to enormous 
sizes. Where the trees would shade his crops, the farmer 
cleared his ground, which meant that he cut the trunks two 
feet above the soil, and grubbed out what was between the 
mutilated boles. If a seaboard farmer traversed the country, 
they pointed out land that would yield one hundred bushels of 
corn to the acre, and everywhere the crop was from fifty to 
eighty, or three times what the New Englander had been used 
to. Crevecoeur said that " a hundred families barely existing 
in some parts of Scotland Avill here in six years cause an an- 
nual exportation of ten thousand bushels of wheat." Again, 
scrutinizing the component parts of the population, he says : 
" Out of twelve families of emigrants of each country, gener- 
ally seven Scotch will succeed, nine German, and four Irish. 
The Scotch are frugal and laborious, but their wives cannot 
work so hard as German women. The Irish love to drink 
and to quarrel, and soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of 
everything." 

The lawless profligacy of the border, which the Irish had 



BORDER LIFE. 



529 



done so much to maintain, and that assimilation of traits which 
entangles the evils of the savage with the vices of the white, 
was now beginning in Kentucky to disappear. The rogue who 
stole horses and altered ear-clips of the cattle and sheep was 
less often seen in the town. The bankrupt from the seaboard 
was sooner suspected, and was the less likely to gather the idlers 
at the trading-stores. The hunter, with his torn moccasins and 
dingy leggings, his shirt blood-stained, and his coon-skin cap 




[This map, from Henry Toulmin's Description of Kentucky, 1792, shows the counties of Ken- 
tucky at that time, namely; Fa = Payette ; Bo = Bourbon ; Ma = Madison; Me = Mercer; 
Je = Jefferson ; Ne =; Nelson ; Li = Lincoln. The towns .are : 1, Lexington ; 2, Boonesborougli ; 
3, St. Aseph ; 4, Louisville ; 5, Harrodsburg. Tlie Cherokee River, the modern Tennessee, is 
described as " navigable 900 miles," and the upper part of it (Te) is called " Tenasee river, a 
branch of the Cherokee."] 

ragged and greasy, still came to the settlement for his powder 
and salt, and enticed Michael and Pat to the frontiers ; but his 
visits were le&s frequent, and he did not linger to make part of 
a life which had grown away from him. The storekeeper, ham- 
pered by barter, gave the tone to the community, while he 
devised the cutting of Spanish dollars into triangular eighths 
to supply the need of small change. The Rev. John Hurt, of 
Lexington, told Wansey that Kentucky was the place to make 
fortunes in trade. He instanced two men who started there 
with less than X200 apiece, and by keeping store, they were 
now ( 1794 ) worth £30,000. They were Scotch-Iri.sh, one might 
assume, and that race had just planted some new seed in the 
founding of Blount College close by Knoxville, now the Uni- 



530 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

versity of Tennessee, in the country lying to the south of Ken- 
tucky and sharing most of its characteristics. Both regions 
were animated by one controlling impulse in their claims upon 
the free navigation of the Mississippi. 

On December 6, 1791, the Spanish minister intimated to 
Jefferson that the authorities at Madrid were ready to treat 
for the settlement of their disputes. Short, at the Hague, was 
directed to ^'oin Carmichael in Madrid. On January 25, 1792, 
Jefferson informed the Spanish minister that the commissioners 
had been appointed, and on March 18 their instructions were 
ready for transmission. The trend of Jefferson's argument in 
these directions was that Spain, in the treaty of January 20, 
1783, had agreed to restore without compensation all north of 
31° of latitude, — the line of earlier charters, proclamations, and 
treaties, — and that the United States, by the Treaty of Inde- 
pendence, received the rights of England north of that parallel, 
and that the bounds of the secret clause of the latter treaty 
were not applicable because England had not obtained Florida, 
as might have been the case, in the treaty with Spain. As to 
the navigation of the Mississippi, tliat had been conceded by 
Spain to England in the treaty of 1763, and the United States 
liad succeeded to the rights of Great Britain. Further, the right 
to use the mouth of a river belonged by the law of nature and 
of nations to the country holding the upper waters, and this 
right was not complete without a port of deposit. A right, 
Jefferson contended, was not to be confounded with a grant 
made to the most favored nation, and stood independent of any 
agreement. If Spain asked any compensation for the conces- 
sion, the commissioners were instructed to offset such a demand 
by a claim of damages for nine j^ears of exclusion from the 
river. 

There was in the councils of the President not a little disa- 
greement as to what concessions it might be well in the end to 
make, as was to be expected where Jefferson and Hamilton 
were in the circle of advisers. Hamilton was more urgent than 
his rival for delaying a war with Spain, though he saw, as all 
did, that a conflict was inevitable in the end, unless the point 
could be carried by negotiation. He urged an alliance with 
England as likely to ward off an outbreak, and thought it could 



OPPOSING PARTIES. 531 

be made for England's advantage by rectifying the northwest 
boundary line in a way to throw some portions of the upper 
Mississipi^i within British territory. This accorded with de- 
mands which England had often hinted at, and made later in the 
negotiation with Jay, as serving to make the provisions of the 
treaty of 1782 intelligible, inasmuch as a right to navigate the 
Mississippi, as that treaty gave, with no access to it, was unintel- 
ligible. Jefferson firmly objected to the alienation of any part 
of the territory of the United States on any conditions. Ham- 
ilton claimed that exigencies might easily sanction it. The ques- 
tion naturally aroused the antipathies of the two antagonistic 
factions into which the American people were rapidly dividing, 
and Randolph, as a sympathizer with the French, fell readily in 
with the views of Jefferson, while Knox sided with Hamilton. 
In New England, at this time, it would doubtless have been found 
on a poll that a withdrawal from the Union was more in favor 
than an alliance with France against England ; and Timothy 
Dwight, the president of Yale College, was so confident in this 
sentiment that he supposed that ninety-nine New Englanders 
out of a hundred held it. Washington carried a steady hand, 
and, though much inclined to take part with Hamilton against 
Jeff'erson, he told his cabinet that an English alliance for this 
end, giving the British a foothold on the Mississippi, was a 
remedy worse than the disease. 

The year 1793 brought new disturbing elements into play. 
On January 21, news of the execution of Louis XVI. had 
reached New Orleans only to arouse in the French Creoles their 
latent republican sympathies. This alarmed Carondelet, and he 
began strengthening the outworks of the city, and laying out 
schemes for an extended defense of the province. The French 
sympathizers were closely in touch with the agitation already 
manifest among the Kentucky discontents, and there were 
rumors of a projected descent of an armed flotilla directed to 
unseat the Spanish authorities. It was known on the seaboard 
that letters were passing to Tom Paine, now a member of the 
National Assembly in Paris ; and two persons whom we havfe 
already encountered were supposed to be movers in these mis- 
chievous schemes against Spain. One was Dr. O'Fallon, not 
suppressed by the failure of his Natchez projects. The other 



532 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

was George Rogers Clark, seeking with his shattered energy to 
emei-ge from what a contemporary observer called " a profound 
slumber for upwards of four years." Jefferson some time 
before had written to Innes that " no man alive rated Clark 
higher than I did, and would again were he to become once 
more what I knew him." 

In view of these reports, already circulating, the President's 
cabinet, on March 10, determined on issuing a proclamation 
against any such warlike demonstration towards Spain, and 
Wayne was instructed to throw troops into Fort Massac, so as 
to intercept any armed invaders of Spanish territory. While 
the President's advisers were considering if the French Revo- 
lution had annulled the obligations of the United States to 
France under the treaty of 1778, Genet, the new minister 
of the French Republic, armed with three hundred blank com- 
missions, as was reported, arrived on April 8, 1793, at Charles- 
ton, on board a French frigate. Before he left Carolina, he 
began issuing his commissions to cruisers against the enemies 
of France. Philadelphia newspapers of April contained both 
the President's proclamation and notices of Genet's arriving in 
that city. During May, 1793, that arrogant visitor was issuing 
other commissions and enjoying the excitement and jubilation 
with which his coming had been hailed. Jefferson grew warm 
in speaking of " the old spirit of 1776, rekindling. The news- 
papers from Boston to Charleston," lie said, " prove this, and 
even the monocrat papers are obliged to publish the most furi- 
ous philippics against England." Jefferson, again in a letter to 
Monroe, June 4, assorts the people : " The old Tories joined by 
our merchants, who trade on British capital, and the idle rich, 
are with the kings. All other descriptions with the French." 
Madison, writing to Jefferson of the President's proclamation, 
"unconstitutional " and "• pusillanimous," as the latter believed 
it, said : " It is mortifying that the President should have any- 
thing to apprehend from the success of liberty in another coun- 
try, since he owes his preeminence to the success of it in his 
own." The President disregarded the aspersions and found 
comfort in Hamilton's counsels. 

Genet was soon planning to give coherency to the passions, 
already seething beyond the mountains, under the influence of 
the inflammatory discussions of the Jacobin clubs, which French 



MICHIGAN AND THE PACIFIC. 533 

adherents had been forming. A Frenchman, sojourning in 
Philadelphia, became his willing' tool. Andre ]Michaax, a man 
of scientific attainments, had before this been selected by the 
American Philosophical Society to explore the valley of the 
Missouri in order to find a short and convenient jiassage to 
the Pacific. " It would seem by the maps," as his 2)roposed 
instructions read, " as if the river called Oregon interlocked 
with the Missouri for a considerable distance ; " and in popular 
conception, as evinced by Morse's Geography of 1794, the two 
rivers were not kept asunder by any mountain ridge. JVIichaux 
was directed after reaching the Pacific to return by the same or 
some other route, and to avoid, both in going and returning, 
the Spanish settlements. The Spanish had always jealously 
guarded their trade in the Missouri valley, but had so far only 
l^artially succeeded in keeping the British out, and the next 
year, Carondelet was complaining that the London fur com- 
panies oi^erating in this region were making a hundred per 
cent, profit. It was, nevertheless, a subject of complaint by 
Dorchester that English traders were interfered with even when 
a hundred miles and more away from Spanish posts. 

This unfruitful project of the Philosophical Society fell in 
opportunely with the interest in westward search, which was 
now engaging the attention of geographers. Vancouver had 
gone to the Pacific, in 1791, with instructions looking to his 
sailing east, perhaps as far as the Lake of the Woods, by a 
supposable passage, which might in some way be found to con- 
nect with the Atlantic. In April, 1792, he had reached the 
northwest coast. On May 11, ensuing. Captain Gray in the 
Boston ship " Columbia," following Vancous^er's track, had 
found what the latter missed, and had entered and ascended, 
for some twenty miles, a great river which he named after his 
ship. It was in part, by virtue of this exploration, that tlie 
United States ultimately assumed jurisdiction over this river's 
course for seven hundred and fifty-two miles, till by the treaty 
of 1846, the upper three hundred miles was given over to Brit- 

NoTE. — The map on the followiiig two pages is from the Spanish Archives, prooured hy Mr. 
Clavpnce W. Bowen, and f;iven to Harvard ColleRe Library. It is a section of an Idea TajxKjriifiva 
de Ids AI/o.s ilil Missi.iipi y del Mix.tniiii, ATio de 17S.J, with corrections to 1794. Tlie Britisli and 
Spanish flags sliow stations of tliose peoples, and tlie dotted lines are the English trading rentes. 
The small squares are trading stations. The triangular ones are nomadic tribes ; the round spots 
are fixed tribes. It shows the Spanish notions regarding the connection of Lake Superior, Lake 
of the Woods, Lake Winnipeg, and Hudson's Bay. 



K., 







POSESiONES \ L 





636 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

ish control. The ti'ibutaries of the Cohimbia ackl six hundred 
additional miles to its navigable waters. Some three hundred 
and fifty thousand square miles of its valley sends its drainage 
ultimately to the sea, beyond where Vancouver saw the forbid- 
ding surf which kept him from entering the river, and enough 
of this vast area lies south of the 49° of latitude to make a fif- 
teenth part of the total area of the present United States. 
This territory was a factor in American civilization hardly com- 
prehended, when Michaux was contemplating an effort to reach 
that region overland. 

The Spaniards, under Galiano and Valdcz, had already, in 
1792, abandoned the search for a passage from the Pacific 
through North America ; and it was left for an English adven- 
turer, Alexander Mackenzie, to be the first to traverse this 
great valley from the inland side. In June, 1793, Mackenzie 
was at the crown of the Rockies, known as Peace River pass. 
He here hit upon the first easily traversable route over the 
mountains, north of that at the headwaters of the Gila, and he 
had been the first white man to stand where the waters parted 
for the Atlantic and for the Pacific. On July 22, 1793, he cut 
his name on a rock overhanging the sea, in latitude 53° 21' in 
British Columbia. Thus within ten years from the time when 
England, by the treaty of Paris (1782-83), confined herself to 
the north of the Great Lakes, her flag had been carried to the 
Pacific. 

Wliile this English pioneer was thus approaching the sea, 
Michaux, his would-be rival, had abandoned the role of an ex- 
plorer for that of a political intriguer. Falling under the influ- 
ence of Genet, he had lent himself to the Jacobin schemes, and 
to further their western plans, Genet had asked Jefferson to 
recognize Michaux as a consul of France to reside in Kentucky. 
This project failing, the French minister devised for his new 
ally, still preserving the appearance of a scientific wanderer, a 
direct mission to the western people. On July 5, he showed 
to the secretary of state the instructions under which it was 
proposed that Michaux should act. There was no concealment 
in this document, and it was unblushingly declared that Michaux 
was to raise from the Kentuckians a force to attack New Or- 
leans, and was also to send an address to the French in Canada 
to rise and throw off the British yoke. There was some reserve 



THE INTRIGUES OF MICHAUX. 



537 



in the fact that the proposed invading force was to rendezvous 
beyond the Mississippi, and outside of American jurisdiction, 
and in this Jefferson recognized a prudent provision, lie was 
incautious enough, however, to give Michaux credentials to 
Governor Shelby, and others were obtained for presentation to 
Clark and Wilkinson. 



g^7^^^^ 




RIVER OF THE WEST. 

[A section of " An exact map of North America," in William Russell's Hi.ttori/ of Anirricn, vol. 
ii. p. 1(U), London, 1778. It connects Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods with Lake 
Superior.] 

Michaux's journal of his western progress, giving for the 
most part his scientific observations, has been edited by Charles 
S. Sargent in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical 
Society (1889). It gives something that the botanist finds of 
use, but the historian gets in the record only stray glimpses 
of this agent's real business. 

The movement had all the effrontery which went with Genet's 
acts. This emissary told A\'ansey, the traveler, at a later day, 



538 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

that all he did was not beyond what those who commissioned 
him, Roland and Brissot, exjjeeted him to do, and this was to 
the end of embroiling, if possible, the United States in a war 
with England and Spain. Genet further openly proposed to 
Jefferson that he could depend on two leaders in Kentucky to 
march an army of liberators to New Orleans, and one of these 
was George Rogers Clark, who in the previous February had 
written to Genet, offering his services. It is said that the 
agents of Genet, who carried west the commissions under which 
Clark was to act, were accredited by letters from John Brown, 
who had been involved in Wilkinson's earlier schemes. These 
leaders had asked Genet for an advance of X3,000, but that 
minister did not find it convenient to furnish such a sum. The 
grand aim of all was to set up Louisiana as an independent ally 
of both the United States and France. 

There is no need to follow Michaux's itinerary very closely. 
On August 14, he left Pittsburg, and on the 24th he moaned 
over the misery of a small remnant of his countrymen remain- 
ing at Gallipolis ; and at Limestone he left the river for the 
interior settlements. 

Just at this time, the Spanish agent in Philadelphia gave the 
President information of the proposed expedition of Clark, and 
Jefferson was instructed to warn Shelby to be on his guard ; 
but the Kentucky governor was either timorous or a sympa- 
thizer, and he replied that he knew nothing of any such ex- 
pedition. In September, Michaux was at Lexington and at 
Danville, and had various conferences with those to whom he 
had taken letters. On the 17th, he saw Clark at Louisville, 
who professed to believe that the scheme had been abandoned, 
it was so long since he had heard anything. The failure to for- 
ward the money which had been asked may have had something 
to do with Clark's ignorance, and with his picturing the difficul- 
ties in the path. There were better prospects when, in October, 
some money was received, and the blank commissions came to 
hand. On October 6, Michaux had returned to Danville. His 
journal is now provokingly meagre ; but Colonel George Nicho- 
las advanced a plan of having a French fleet first seize the 
mouth of the Mississippi, and this force having declared the 
country French, the Americans were to be invited to descend 
the river, fighting their way if it became necessary. 



CLARK'S PROJECT. 539 

The federal government was now (October) so far alarmed 
that Jefferson wrote to the backward Shelby, directing- him to 
use military foi-ce if the courts were powerless to stop the pro- 
ceedings, and St. Clair was at the same time ordered to hold 
some militia in readiness. On November 6, Jefferson repeated 
his injunctions to Shelby, and asked him to remember that the 
government could best settle the Mississippi question by ne- 
gotiations then goiug on. On the next day, St. Clair wrote to 
Shelby a letter, which was probably to reach him in advance 
of the other, telling him of the gathering of French officers at 
the falls of the Ohio, and urging him to act promptly. 

Meanwhile rumors of the Jacobins' intentions were reaching 
Carondelet in an exaggerated form. His alarm increasing, on 
January 2, 1794, the Spanish governor dispatched a letter to 
Simcoe, giving that British conunander at Detroit the extrava- 
gant stories w^hich had reached New Orleans. Carondelet in- 
formed him that a million dollars had been raised for the expe- 
dition under Clark, who had undertaken to raise five thousand 
men for the enterprise. lie pointed out how it would be for 
the interest of England that Spain should secure a foothold in 
the Illinois counti-y. Simcoe later (April 11) replied that, 
while he agreed with the views of Carondelet, there was no 
chance for his cooperation, since, indeed, with Wayne jjrepar- 
ing for an advance, the Canadian governor had enough to 
occupy him. 

Three weeks before Carondelet had written this anxious let- 
ter, Michaux, returning from the west through the Holston 
country, had reached Philadelphia (December 12, 1793), and 
in a month's time he was conferring with Brown and Orr, Ken- 
tucky members of the House, " on the disposition of the federal 
government and the execution of General Clark's ]ilan." This 
was on January 12, 1794. On the 24th, Michaux sent |400 
to Clark, — so pitiful the contrast with Carondelet's supposed 
sums, — and wrote letters to his Kentucky friends. Before 
these missives reached Clark and his friends, this American 
" general of the legion of the French Republic " had valiantly 
published in T/ie Ccntinol of tJie jVorflt Wrsf, a pajier printed 
at Cincinnati, on January 25, his pro])osals for raising troops, 
— two thousand were talked of. — ])roniising each one thou- 
sand acres of land, two thousand if they served a year, and 



540 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

three thousand if for two years. They were also assured of a 
due share of all lawful plunder. It was understood that the 
general was gathering flatboats at the falls for a jubilant voy- 
age down the Mississipi^i. 

Jefferson, who more and more had found himself outside the 
President's confidence, had at the opening of the year witli- 
drawn from his advisers to give place to another republican, 
Randolph. The government, after all its efforts to check this 
western movement, had felt sensibly the weakness of Shelby, 
whose elevation had not induced to render him conservative. 
The letters of the Kentucky governor to Randolph continued 
to be couched in the language of evasion. Instead of giving 
adhesion to the requests of the government, he preferred to 
discuss the unquestionable rights of the west to the navigation 
of the Mississippi. lie went on repeating the tales of Spanish 
instigation of the Indians, which went without saying ; but he 
showed no patience with the government's efforts to accomplish 
by peaceful diplomacy the results which he wished for. 

The animosity in Kentucky against the government was 
indeed undisguised, and Shelby's course, with the support of 
popular sentiment, was in contrast with the assiduity of Blount 
in Tennessee, who supported Robertson in checking all symp- 
toms of reaction. In Kentucky, every action of the adminis- 
tration was scrutinized for a symptom of inimical predisposition, 
and there was good ground, it was thought, for apprehension, 
when, in April, 1794, it was announced that Jay, an enemy of 
western interests, had been selected for the mission to Eng- 
land. 

As the spring progressed, there was an increasing anxiety in 
government circles. Wolcott believed that an expedition had 
already started. Letters from St. Clair confirmed the stories 
of the excited condition in Kentucky. He repeated to the sec- 
retary of state the rumors which he had heard of a French fleet 
to cooperate, — doubtless the spreading of Nicholas's views. 
He wrote of letters to Clark from the eastern Jacobins passing 
through the hands of a certain "■ Monsieur Micheau " at Lexing- 
ton, and that $2,000 had been sent to Clark. 

St. Clair, during these days, was often writing to Washington 
of the precarious condition of the western country. He thought 
that the British were intriguing with certain Kentuckians to 



GENET AND FAUCHET. 541 

force that region into a Spanish war ; but he was at the same time 
confident that if the United States and Spain drifted into a con- 
flict, England would be found on the side of Spain, as Caron- 
delet and Simcoe had proposed. Spain, he contended, had good 
reason to tremble for the Mexican mines, and Carondelet was 
urging the better fortifying of the line of the Mississippi. It was 
certain, in St. Clair's view, that Carondelet and some leaders 
of opinion in Kentucky were in accord. Morgan, in St. Clair's 
judgment, "" possessed a very great degree both of activity and 
insinuation, and is not much restrained by principle," and was 
depended upon by Carondelet to lure emigrants over the Mis- 
sissippi. In another of his letters, St. Clair represents that 
Morgan's " exertions are turned to Kentucky, where there are 
a very great number of people who have been disappointed in 
obtaining land, and are ready to go to any place where it can 
be easily obtained. Many will make the experiment. If it 
continues to be one of their maxims to prevent the free naviga- 
tion of the Mississippi, the situation [New Madrid] directly 
opposite the mouth of the Ohio seems not to be ill chosen with 
a view to it. The Spanish commanders on the Mississippi are 
also assiduously endeavoring to induce the ancient French in- 
habitants to abandon their country, and they have succeeded with 
great numbers." St. Clair recommends, as a corrective of this, 
that the government should sell its lands on the Mississippi and 
the Illinois at low prices. 

During the preceding summer. Genet's doings had become so 
high-handed in every way, both in his aims at the west and in 
similar but abortive efforts to attack Florida from the side of 
Georgia and South Carolina, — where probably there was some 
popular enthusiasm for the venture, — that even Jefferson, then 
in the cabinet, had seen the necessity of getting rid of his pesti- 
lent influence. So, on August 15, 1793, he had written to Morris 
in Paris, to demand that the French Republic should recall 
its minister. On the arrival of Fauchet, as Genet's successor, 
the western expedition was countermanded, and on March 29, 
1794, Randolph wrote to the Kentucky authorities, saying, "The 
present minister of the French Republic has publicly disavowed 
and recalled the commissions which have been granted." In 
the fear that the Jacol)in threats in the west would involve the 
country in a war with Spain, a bill had before this been intro- 



542 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

duced into Congress, calling for the raising of 25,000 men for 
the defense of the southwest, but on Fauchet's disavowal of 
further incitements, the bill had been withdrawn. It was soon, 
however, clear that the passionate appeals at the west would 
take some time to lose their effect, and the government heard 
with some alarm that subscriptions were still pledged in Lex- 
ington for money, and that the President's proclamation was in 
many places suppressed. On May 24, when a convention gath- 
ered at Lexington, the Jacobin fever still ran high, and it was 
helped by the tone of the Kentucky Gazette. In June, Con- 
gress made it punishable by fine and imprisonment for a citizen 
to engage in any hostile enterprise against a foreign state, a 
provision soon to be further enforced in Jay's treaty. When 
the Jacobins spoke of it now as aimed at the French sympa- 
thizers, they were not pleased to be told that it had been also 
a provision of the treaty with France in 1778. 

A comparison of the views of Hamilton and Randolph at 
this time shows how the two antagonistic parties of the cabinet 
were brought into pretty close conjunction in their apprehen- 
sions. Hamilton wrote to Jay, in May, 1794, that the navi- 
gation of the Mississippi, if secured, will be " an infinitely 
strong link of union between the western country and the At- 
lantic States. As its preservation will depend on the naval 
resources of the Atlantic States, the western country cannot but 
feel that this essential interest depends on its remaining firmly 
united with them." Randolph's letter was addressed to Jeffer- 
son, in August : " The people of Kentucky, either contemning 
or ignorant of the consequences, are restrained from hostility 
by a pack-thread. They demand a conclusion of the negotia- 
tion, or a categorical answer from Spain. . . . What if the gov- 
ernment of Kentucky should force us either to support them in 
their hostilities against Spain, or to disavow and renounce them. 
War at this moment with Spain would not be war with Spain 
alone. The lopping off of Kentucky from the Union is dread- 
ful to contemplate, even if it should not attach itself to some 
other power.'' There was indeed a strong apprehension that 
England might succeed in entangling the Kentuckians. Sim- 
coe was soon to write to the Lords of Trade (Se])tember 1) : 
" It is generally understood that above half the inhabitants of 
Kentucky and the western waters are already inclined to a con- 



THE CREEKS. 543 

nection with Great Britain." Thurston, a Kentucky obsever, 
had just before written to Washington that a powerful faction 
was scheming to place that country under British protection. 

With these sujspressed murmurings threatening to become 
open shouts in the autumn of 1794, we need, before passing on 
to the fulfillments of 1795, to turn back to the spring of 1798, 
and watch other ominous signs, which made these two years in 
the southwest exceptionally trying in their precarious condi- 
tions, since there was no question, in which the relations of 
Spain and the United States were involved, that did not inti- 
mately concern the danger of an Indian war. The federal gov- 
ernment could never be safely unprepared. When it was de- 
termined in May, 1793, to reinforce the federal troops in this 
endangered region, the government possessed abundant evidence 
of the complicity of Carondelet in the unrest of the Creeks, and 
it is now known that he was strenuously urging his government 
to let him band all the Indians in the interests of Spain. Jef- 
ferson sent the proofs of Carondelet's intrigues with the tribes 
to Carmichael at Madrid. The better to learn exactly what 
was going on in New Orleans, where branches of American 
commercial houses were become not uncommon, Jefferson was, 
in May, 1793, looking " for an intelligent and prudent native " 
to reside in that city, while, under cover of business, he could 
get opportunities to spy upon the intentions of Carondelet. In 
June, the government had learned that 1,500 men had been sent 
from Spain to Louisiana, and that Spanish posts on the upper 
Mississippi had been strengthened. A few days later (June 23), 
he wrote to Madison of the " inevitableness of a war with the 
Creeks, and the probability — I might say certainty — of a war 
with Spain." Some Ohio traders, who had gone down the 
iMississippi in their flatboats, and had returned to Philadel])hia 
by water, were at the same time interrogated by Knox for in- 
formation, and at the close of the month, Jefferson was in pos- 
session of new evidence of Spanish instigation of the Creeks, 
which he transmitted to Carmichael. Later on, the administra- 
tion was urged by Georgians and Carolinians to autliorize the 
mobilizing of four or five thousand militia under General 
Pickens to attack the Creeks in the autumn. The government 
hesitated for fear of provoking a Spanish :iiid jierlmps an Eng- 



544 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

lish war ; and upon the project of sending a secret agent to the 
Choctaws to induce them to join the Chickasavvs against the 
Ci-eeks, and so distract the hitter, the cabinet was divided. 
Meanwhile Robertson was furnishing arms to the Chickasaws, 
and when Carondelet remonstrated with the government at 
Phihidelphia, the tie in the cabinet vote enabled them to deny 
rendering any aid, and to assert that their influence was for 
peace. 

In eastern Tennessee there was less restraint. Every issue 
of the Knoxville Gazette clamored for a war of extermination 
against the Creeks. Some of that tribe crossing the river in 
September, Sevier mustered his militia, and drove them back 
by a midnight attack, and, following them to their villages, 
burned them, and laid waste their fields. This was Sevier's 
last Indian camj^aign, and it brought peace to the borders of 
east Tennessee. The invasion of the Indian territory had been 
in defiance of the orders from Philadelphia ; but Andrew Jack- 
son, three years later, then a new representative from Tennes- 
see, succeeded in getting the general government to reimburse 
the local authorities for the cost of it. 

Washington, in addressing Congress at the end of the year 
1793, told them that the Chickamaugas were still uneasy, and 
doubted if anything like a steady peace could be maintained 
with the southwestern tribes till there was some system of 
organized trade with them arranged, to prevent the provoca- 
tions to which they were at present subjected. He added, in 
another speech, that if the Creeks were to be sustained by the 
Spanish in their claims to bound on the Cumberland, and if 
the authorities at New Orleans persisted in a right to arbi- 
trate between the United States and the Indians inhabiting 
American territory, it was clear that an issue must come with 
Spain. He informed Congress that he had sent a messenger to 
Madrid to learn how far the government at Madrid sustained 
Carondelet in these pretensions. 

A review of the next year, 1794, shows us pretty much the 
same troublesome conditions on this southwestern border. The 
chief perplexity was in the fact that the irresponsible frontiers- 

NoTE. — The opposite "Map of the Tennassee government, by Genl. D. Smith and others," is 
from Cnye>/\i American Atlas, Pliiladelphia, lT!t5. It shows the Indian towns on tlie Tennessee, 
and tlieir relation to Nasliville and the Cumberland settlements. Cf. the map in Reid's Amer- 
ican Atlas, New York, 179G. 



I 







546 THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST. 

men caused niucli of the mischief. La Rochefoucault-Lian- 
court, who, a little later, went through this country, found it 
" allowed on all sides that the whites are in the wrong four 
times out of five." Unfairness in traffic had driven the Indian 
trade largely from the Georgian border to Pensacola, and the 
lawlessness of the borderers in inciting the enmity of some 
thirty-five thousand Indians, now supposed to be the combined 
numbers of the Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws, threw a serious 
responsibility upon the Americans, whatever may have been the 
complicity of the Spaniards. These thirty-five thousand In- ^ 
dians were said to be able to show twelve thousand warriors, 
old and young, and the mastery of the Creeks was indicated by 
their furnishing nearly half of this fighting force. 

The conditions which generally prevailed were that the Cher- 
okees were the general rovers now plundering on the borders of 
Carolina and Georgia, now on the north against the Cumberland 
settlers, under the lead usually of the local Chickamaugas, or 
joining in combined onsets on the Chickasaws. The Creeks by 
their numbers strengthened almost every assault. The Choc- 
taws, nearer the Spanish, at New Orleans, did not so often 
appear, except by their strolling bucks. Back of it all was, as 
the Americans believed, and doubtless with right, the influence 
of Carondelet and his agents. It was said, perhaps in exaggera- 
tion, that the Spanish largesses paid to these tribes were some- 
thing like $55,000 a yeai% a sum nearly the equal of the revenue 
of Louisiana. The Indian confederation was broken by the 
friendliness of the Chickasaws for the whites, and it was Caron- 
delet's constant aim to rend this somewhat fitful alliance. 

While this was the obstacle in the way of the Spanish gov- 
ernor, the nearest representative of the American government, 
Blount, at Knoxville, was quite as much tried to carry out the 
instructions of the secretary of war to prevent unauthorized 
attacks and retaliative inroads by the American settlers. In 
the spring of 1794, it appeared to the territorial assembly at 
Knoxville that such restraint was no longer judicious, and they 
petitioned the general government for open war with the Creeks. 
On June 6, Ruf us King reported in Congress a bill for an offen- 
sive campaign against the Creeks and Cherokees. Instead of 
action upon it, Knox very soon entertained a deputation of 
Clierokees at Philadelphia, and reojiened the question of the 



ORR'S EXPEDITION. 547 

boundaries which had been established by the treaty of July 
2, 1791. They complained that the line, as marked, was as 
crooked as Blount's heart, and insisted upon a straight one 
which would have sacrificed sundry white settlements. The old 
line was left, however, to be amended a few years later, and, as 
a peace offering, Knox agreed to add 'if>5,000 worth of goods 
annually to the largess the Cherokees had already received. 

In September, 1794, the federal government not acting 
promptly in giving permission for an active campaign, Robert- 
son ordered Major Orr to march with five hundred mounted 
Kentucky and Tennessee militia against the lower Cherokee 
towns. A small body of federal troops, who were ranging in 
the mountains, joined the ex23edition. Orr left Nashville on 
September 7, and, guided by a young man who had been a 
prisoner among the Chickamaugas, he took a circuitous moun- 
tain path, and on the 13th, swooped down ujjon two Indian 
villages in succession, and killed seventy of their defenders, 
having only two of his own men wounded. Blount and the 
federal government complain of the disobedience of orders, but 
the Nickajack expedition — as it was called — was too necessary 
to be made a subject of serious complaint. The Indians soon 
sued for peace, and as in the case of Sevier's expedition, Rob- 
ertson's prompt action brought peace to the frontiers in that 
part of the territory, and in a similar way, as in Sevier's case, 
the insubordination was later vindicated b}^ Congressional ap- 
proval. On December 8, Washington informed Congress that 
both Creeks and Cherokees had confirmed existing treaties, and 
had restored prisoners and property. He added that the con- 
tinuance of peace was hazarded by the constant and wanton mur- 
ders of tribesmen committed along the Georgian frontiers. Ed- 
mund Pendleton shortly afterwards (December 30, 1794) drew 
the President's attention to the impolicy of the largess system, 
and no doubt spoke the truth when he said : " The old counsel- 
ors among the Indians will profess to be at peace, and continue 
to receive their annuity, while their 3"oung men continue their 
depredations, and the others will say they cannot restrain 
them." The gift system, undoubtedly, as Washington saw, had 
this objection ; but the President could not bring himself to 
believe that the tribes did not in justice demand some recom- 
pense for the injury which had been done them. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

PINCKNEY'S treaty and the KENTUCKY INTRIGUE. 

1795-1796. 

Although when Jefferson left the circle of the President's 
advisers at the opening of 1794, the movement of the federal 
government for a treaty with Spain on the basis of a free navi- 
gation of the Mississippi had taken shape looking to the ap- 
l^ointment of a special commissioner to Madrid, it was not till 
the following autumn that the choice of such an agent was seri- 
ously considered, and then it was Patrick Henry who was the 
selection of the President. Henry refused the trust on account 
of his precarious health, and it was not till November 24 that 
this preliminary motion was effected by the transference of 
Thomas Pinckney, then in London, to the court of Madrid. 
This done, Washington hastened in December, 1794, to allay 
the continued irritation of Kentucky by writing to Innes that 
the initiatory steps for a treaty with Spain had been made. 
On February 15, 1795, Randolph instructed Monroe, then in 
Paris, " to seize any favorable moment " to bring the Missis- 
sippi question to an issue. Before Monroe coidd have received 
these injunctions, Tom Paine, in the convention, tried to secure 
the help of France by proposing that the freedom of that river 
should be made a condition of peace between France and Spain. 
The treaty made by Jay, however, was too offensive to France 
to make her representatives anxious to abet any interests of the 
American Republic. They were, moreover, aggrieved at being, 
as they thought, rather cavalierly treated in not being early in- 
formed of the provisions of the Jay treaty. It was nine or ten 
months after the rumors of its conditions reached them before, 
in the autumn of 1795, the American papers brought them the 
full text of the treaty. 

Wliile thus, in the appointment of Pinckney, the negotia- 
tions were fairl}^ inaugurated in Europe, the old question of the 



THE YAZOO GRANTS. 549 

Yazoo grants was revived in a way threatening new complications 
with Spain by forestalling the decisions o£ the negotiators. All 
effoi'ts of holders under earlier grants to effect some compromise 
by consolidation had failed, and the whole matter, in the autumn 
of 1794, had seemed doomed to oblivion. But as matters now 
stood, there were four claimants somehow to be reconciled before 
these Yazoo projects could be put on a satisfactory basis. Spain 
still claimed to latitude 32° 30', and her claim, it was supposed, 
would be pressed with Pinckney. The federal government con- 
tended that the treaty of 1782 had given it the right to this 
contested region, and this right had been in part strengthened 
through the cession by South Carolina, in 1787, of that long, 
narrow strip lying between the extension of the northern bound- 
ary of Georgia and the south line of Tennessee, unless indeed 
that strip had been included already in the " territory south of 
the Ohio." Against this claim of the United States Georgia 
had rested her case on the royal commission to Governor 
Wright, and the federal rejection of her cession of the country 
in 1788. Counting upon her rights as Geoi'gia understood 
them, her legislature had, in December, 1794, regranted some 
thirty million acres for #500,000, at a price of about 11 cents 
an acre, to the four companies which had been the earlier recip- 
ients of the region, and this bill, amended in some respects to 
suit the governor's views, became by his signature a law on 
January 7, 1795. Thus passed to the control of these com- 
panies a large part of the present States of Alabama and 
Mississippi. These companies under their new names were the 
Upper Mississippi Company, which received a region in the 
northwest extending twenty-five miles south of the Tennessee 
boundary ; the Tennessee Company, wdiich obtained much the 
same area as was given to it in 1789 ; the Georgia Mississippi 
Company, wliich covered the south w'estern region extending from 
31° 18' to 32° 40' north latitude ; and the Georgia Company, 
the largest of all, which received seventeen million acres lying 
between 32" 40' and 34°, l)ut east of the Tond^igbee River, its 
southern line running upon the 31st parallel. Its extension east 
and west was from the Alabama liiver to the Mississip])i. It 
was soon discovered that every vote but one in the legislatui-e 
wliich liad made these imperial grants came from members in 
one or another of the companies, and cries of coi-ruption w^ere 



550 PINCKNETS TREATY. 

raised in all quarters of the State. It turned out also that 
many federal and state officials were complicated in the busi- 
ness. The terms of the grant made the lands free from taxa- 
tion, and when settled they were to be entitled to representa- 
tion in the legislature. That the governor had not vetoed the 
act was thought to liaA^e been due rather to his complacency 
than to any pecuniary connection of his own with the measure. 
There was a hope that a constitutional convention which was 
summoned for the following May would be able to right the 
wrong ; but the same interest which had swerved the legisla- 
ture from rectitude prevailed there, and the question was rele- 
gated to the next legislature, where there was not the same 
chance that the grantees could be protected. General James 
Jackson, who was in the federal senate, resigned his station to 
be elected to the coming legislature, and he carried a rescind- 
ing act through that body ; but ultimately all innocent purchas- 
ers from the companies were duly protected. 

Such a scandal further invalidating titles of lands still in dis- 
pute with Spain was an unfortunate conjiinction at this stage 
of the negotiation at Madrid, and it is not perhaps surprising 
that Carondelet, on the Spanish side, sought further to arrest 
an amicable settlement. He had already made some show, by 
ceasing to incite the Indians, in acquiescing in the diplomatic 
moven^ent ; but in the uncertainty attending the negotiations, he 
had determined to secure the long-sought vantage-ground in Ken- 
tucky which Spain had always desired. He was not unmind- 
ful of the chance that the Kentuckians in their restlessness 
might yield either to France or England, and was not quite svu-e 
which event Spain should most distrust. The Jacobins in the 
United States had already begun to play upon the patriotic 
impulses of their compatriots in Louisiana, and he had found 
handbills urging them to rise against their Spanish oppressors 
circulating in New Orleans. These same incendiary appeals 
contrasted the servile condition of the French Creoles with the 
freedom in Kentucky, and warned the French Louisianians to 
expect an armed flotilla to aid them in their revolt. 

New Orleans at this time was not well prepared to withstand 
a vigorous assault. Collot, a French military observer, whom 
we have already encountered, and who was arrested later by 
Carondelet, described its forts as diminutive and badly placed 



LOUISIANA. 551 

to ward off an attack from without, though they might prove to 
be sufficient to quell a revolt. Tliis last had probably been the 
governor's purpose in placing them. Five hundred men, sword 
in hand, could carry any one of them, as Collot claimed, and 
the guns of each could be turned, when captured, upon the 
others. None of them could hold more than a hundred and 
fifty defenders. The seaward defenses of the town were better. 
Fort Pla(piemines, eighteen miles from the mouth of the Missis- 
sippi, was indeed settling on the piles on which it was built ; 
but its parapet was eighteen feet thick and lined with brick. 
It had twenty-four guns, and could house three hundred men, 
though only a hundred were now in it. The land within range 
of its guns was not practicable for any protection to the be- 
siegers, and the river at this point was twelve to fourteen hun- 
dred yards wide. 

The province of Louisiana was just beginning to show signs 
of a connnercial future, and if the money which was spent on 
lai'gesses to the Indians could be turned to internal improve- 
ments, this business progress could be easily developed. The 
culture of indigo had, owing to a blight, been largely aban- 
doned, but a more important industry was just developing 
in the reintroduction of the sugar-cane. An Illinois Creole, 
Etienne de Bore, on his plantation six miles above New Orleans, 
had sliown such a success in its growth that in a few years the 
products increased to five million pounds of sugar, two hundred 
thousand gallons of rum, and two hundred and fifty thousand 
gallons of molasses. Almost coincident with this new agricul- 
tural development, Eli Whitney, by the invention of tlie cotton- 
gin, which under the law of April 10, 1790, he had patented 
on ]\Iarch 4, 1794, had caused the exportation of cotton to ad- 
vance enormously, from two hundred thousand i)ounds in 1791 
to eighteen million pounds in 1800. (\:)n()t, who had not found 
the AViiitney invention in operation in 1795, said that the seeds 
were still separated by a coarse mill, which breaks the fibre and 
diminishes its value a quarter, but he adds, " A better machine 
has been introduced into the United States, which is no doubt 
susceptible of greater perfection, and the cotton has already re- 
sumed its old price." 

The west, to be prospei'ous, shared with Louisiana the neces- 
sity of putting an end both to the endless marauding of the 



552 PINCKNEY'S TREATY. 

Indians and to the uncertainty of the civil government. The 
Indian question had practically now come to a composition of 
the feud existing between the Chickasaws and the Creeks. 
Both Robertson and the Spanish commander at Natchez ex- 
ei'ted themselves as mediators, and in the early summer of 1795, 
these two tribes came to an agreement which, barring the out- 
bursts of some irrepressible bucks on each side, quieted the 
Indian country. News of Wayne's victory in the north served 
to increase the disinclination to war, and after some months 
there was, for the first time in a long period, substantial peace 
in the southwest, and in October, 1795, Washington congratu- 
lated Hamilton on the prevalence of " peace from one end of 
our frontiers to the other." 

This condition relieved the people of Tennessee from the 
necessity of the military escort to which they had been accus- 
tomed in attending their conventions, and a disposition to pre- 
pare for entering the Union becoming manifest, Blount ordered 
a special cession of the territorial assembly for June 29, 1795, 
to consider the question of Statehood. A census was ordered 
to see if the sixty thousand persons, counting free people and 
" three fifths of all others," — the United States Constitution 
had given them the phrase, — necessary, under the precedence 
of the ordinance of 1787, to pass from a territorial condition, 
could be made out. If not, it was a question whether a lesser 
number would warrant their taking initiatory steps in the same 
direction. The count showed a population of seventy-seven 
thousand two hundred and sixty-three, while the vote for State- 
hood had been six thousand five hundred and four with two 
thousand five hundred and sixty-two in the negative, the latter 
mostly in middle Tennessee. So Blount issued a call for ia 
constitutional convention to meet on January 11, 1796, though 
it was problematical if by that time the Spanish negotiations 
would have decided the question of the Mississippi. The pros- 
pect had induced new currents of emigration from the east ; 
a new road had been cut over the Cumberland Mountains, and 
in the autumn of the previous year thirty or forty wagons went 
over it to establish new homes. A traveler that way in 1796 
ro])orts that between Nashville and Knoxville he met one 
hundred and seventy-five wagons, and seventeen or eighteen 
hundred bathorses, carrying emigrants and their property to 
th.e Cumberland settlements. 



KENTUCKY INTRIGUES. 553 

Carondelet's hopes for some new distractions, which might 
tend to the Spanish interest, rested not on these stabler com- 
munities of the Cumberhuid, but on the more restless settle- 
ments on the Kentucky. In June, 1795, that Spanish governor 
addressed a letter to Judge Sebastian, at Frankfort, offering 
to send Colonel Gayoso to New Madrid, to meet those whom 
Sebastian might send there to discuss the question of the Mis- 
sissippi, — an effort necessarily subversive of the policy which 
the two governments had now entered upon at ^ladrid of com- 
ing to a conclusion by agreement on this vexed question. Later, 
and before he had received the letter of June, Sebastian was 
again apprised of the intention of Gayoso to be in New Madrid 
in October. That the meeting was held of course compromises 
Sebastian and his friends, as representatives of the United 
States, to an equal degree with Carondelet. Even if, as the 
Americans professed, they entered upon these private negotia- 
tions for business interests only, the matter was none the less 
one for the federal government to manage. 

Gayoso went north from Natchez with other ostensible ob- 
jects than to deal with the renegades whom he sought. He 
stopped at the Chickasaw Bluffs and bargained with the Indian 
owners for a tract of land along the river, six miles long and 
from a half mile to a mile broad, and on this he built and gar- 
risoned a fort. When General Wayne heard of this occupa- 
tion of American soil, he demanded an explanation, and Gayoso 
answered from " On board the Vigilant before New Madrid, 
2nd October, 1795," that he had a right to treat with an inde- 
pendent tribe, and cited an agreement of the United States 
with the Chickasaws as to their bounds. He accompanied this 
witli protestations of friendship. A few days before, he had 
written to St. Clair, then at Kaskaskia, asking for a conference 
to further the reciprocal interests of the two countries. From 
New Madrid, after thus trying to ))lind St. Clair, he sent 
Thomas Power — an Irishman, speaking French, Spanish, and 
English, naturalized in Spain, who professed to be a wander- 
ing naturalist — to open intercourse with Sebastian and his 
friends. This done. Power passed on to Cincinnati, and saw 
Wilkinson, then at Fort Washington, and wearing the Ameri- 
can uniform. This renegade American general now wrote to 
Carondelet, recommending that the Spanish governor should 



554 PINCKNEY'S TREATY. 

resume his shipments up the river in order to restore confi- 
dence ; that he shovild fortify the mouth of the Ohio against 
any possible English inroad : that he should establish a bank 
in Kentucky with American directors ; and that he should em- 
ploy George Rogers Clark and his followers in the Spanish 
service. It will be recollected that the French Republic had 
no further use of Clark and his soldiers of fortune. Sebastian 
went to New Madrid, but was not able to come to any agree- 
ment on the commercial ventures, which were to be a part of 
their plot, and he invited Judge Innes and William Murray 
to take part in the discussion. Being unable to agree with 
Gayoso, this official and Sebastian, in October, left New Madrid 
and proceeded to New Orleans, to lay the problems before 
Carondelet, reaching there in January, 1796. Before their 
conferences were over, news reached New Orleans of the con- 
clusion of a treaty with Spain ; and the intriguers were forced 
to resort to other schemes. As these were in contravention 
of the treaty which had alarmed them, it is necessary now to 
follow the events which led to that pacification, and the conclu- 
sions which were readied, perfidious though they were on the 
part of Spain, 

On December 8, 1795, the President had said to Congress 
that they might hope for a speedy conclusion of a satisfactory 
treaty with Spain, and before the terms of it were known, they 
were accurately prefigured to the public. 

Pinckney had reached Madrid on June 28, 1795, but it was 
not till August 10 — such were the obstacles and prevarica- 
tions usually inherent in Spanish diplomacy — that the Amer- 
ican commissioner was allowed to lay his propositions before 
the Prince of Peace, who had been appointed to deal with him. 
Tliis grandee then submitted the impossibility of going for- 
ward, as he had not yet received any answer to the proposition 
which he had sent to the United States, to sell the right to 
navigate the Mississippi for a consideration, if the American 
Re])ublic would guarantee the Spanish territorial possessions on 
its banks. Pinckney replied that his countrymen would never 
purchase a right, and that it was out of the question for them to 
make such a guarantee. He then rehearsed the old arguments. 
Spain had never questioned the provisions of the treaty of 1782 
at the time she made with England the general treaty of Janu- 



THE TREATY SIGNED. 555 

aiy 20, 1783, and nothing bnt the bounds of 1782 could ever 
satisfy the United States, as the same bounds had satisfied 
England in 1763, with the provision of a free navigation of the 
Mississippi from source to mouth, as inherent now as then. 

The summer dragged on with little or no progress, and in 
October, disgusted and chagrined, Pinckney demanded his pass- 
])orts. The work upon which no progress had been made in four 
months was now suddenly done in three days, and the treaty 
was signed on October 27, 1795. The next day Pinckney wrote 
to his own government that the threatening relations of Eng- 
land and the United States had obstructed the negotiations as 
well as the peaceful attitude of Great Britain towards Spain. 

The text of the treaty arrived in Philadelphia on February 
22, 1796, and tlie Senate promptly ratified it. 

The bounds by the Mississippi and on Florida were exactly 
what the Americans had claimed under the treaty of independ- 
ence. Spain made no provision for rendering valid the grants 
she had made north of 31°, and they were left to the decision 
of the United States. It was provided that a joint commission 
should meet at Natchez, six months after ratification, to run the 
lines. 

The navigation of tlie Mississippi, from source to mouth, 
was fully assured for both parties. Pinckney sought to save a 
conflict with Jay's treaty by inserting that, beside the two con- 
tracting powers, " others, by sjjecial convention," could enjoy 
the same right. Spain insisted that the grant to England in 
the Jay treaty of right to navigate the Mississippi was of no 
avail, as the United States only derived such a right by the 
present treat}^. 

The port of New Orleans was established for three years as 
a place of deposit, with no duties chargeable, and after that 
interval tlie same or other place of deposit should be allowed. 

Both parties agreed to restrain the Indians on either side of 
the dividing line, and to use force if necessary. It was on the 
pretense that Spain did not impede an invasion of Georgia by 
the Seminoles, in 1815, that ]\Ionroe ordered Andrew Jackson 
at that time to pursue them over the Spanish line. 

Spain agreed to evacuate all ports held by her on American 
territory within six months, and the United States were put 
under similar obligations, if conditions required it. 



556 PINCKNEY'S TREATY. 

Ratifications of this treaty of San Lorenzo el real were 
exchanged on April 26, 1796, and on August 2 it was duly 
l)roclaimed. 

So decisive an abandonment of her old policy by Spain, as 
this treaty evinced, naturally x-aised the question of the sincerity 
of the Spanish government. Pinckney and Hamilton thought 
that the sudden change in the Spanish temper came from an 
apprehension that the United States and England, as a result 
of Jay's treaty, were preparing for a joint declaration of war 
against France and Spain. Such a fear may have prevailed in 
the French council, and Sj)ain and the French Directory were 
now in close contact. It was said that the Si)anish king yielded 
reluctantly, and had no real intention of carrying the treaty out, 
if circumstances and delays could help him to retain the Sj^anish 
posts on the Mississippi. It was known that Gayoso later 
boasted that the treaty would never be put in force, and Caron- 
delet acted, both in his subsequent conduct and in the proposi- 
tions he forwarded by Sebastian to Kentucky, — as we shall 
see, — as if he Avas of like belief. It was also believed that 
Spain hoped to pacify the United States while she dallied with 
the provisions of the treaty long enough to profit from a neu- 
tral territory being interposed between Louisiana and a British 
attack. Talleyrand saw nothing but misfortune in Spain's 
al)andonment of the east bank of the Mississip]:>i, and looked 
in the end for a countervail to France in the cession of Florida 
and Louisiana. 

Washington, when the treaty had been carried through the 
Senate, expressed tlie hope that it woidd prove " soothing to 
the inhabitants of the western waters, wlio were beginning to 
grow restive and clamoroi\s." He little knew that Judge Innes, 
in whom he had confided all along to quiet the discontent, was 
deep in the nefarious plot of Sebastian, — the former being a 
circuit jndge of the United States, and the other the chief justice 
of Kentucky. The infamous Sebastian engaged to give his ser- 
vices to Spain, to subserve her interests and subvert those of his 
own country, for a yeai-ly pension of f 2,000, and he received 
the stipend regularly. 

After thus debasing himself, Sebastian, accompanied by 
Power, in the spring of 1796, sailed from New Orleans for 



WILKINSON AND SEBASTIAN. 557 

Philadelphia, and thence passed westward with the following 
propositions from Carondelet : To prepare Kentuck}^ for a 
revolntion, and to give them money to oi'ganize the project, 
-1100,000 will be sent to Kentucky. When independence is 
declared, Fort Massac shall be occnpied by Spanish troops, and 
$100,000 shall be applied in supporting the garrison. The 
northern bounds of Spanish territory are to be a line running 
west from the mouth of the Yazoo River to the Tombigbee, 
while all north of such a line shall, except the reservation 
recently fortified at the Chickasaw Bluff, belong to the revolted 
State, which shall enter into a defensive alliance witli Spain. 
The new treaty of San Lorenzo shall not be observed ; but the 
new State shall enjoy the navigation of the Mississippi. Ten 
thousand dollars were to be sent in sugar barrels up the river 
to Wilkinson, now the general-in-chief of the American army I 

Power was obliged to return to New Orleans with the report 
that the Spanish treaty had indisposed the Kentucky intriguers 
to further machinations. A^ ilkinson, however, was not forgot- 
ten, and if we are to believe a vindicator of that faithless per- 
sonage, this money in sugar bai'rels was only his return from a 
tobacco venture. The specie was sent by tw^o messengers. One 
got safely through. The other was murdered by his own boat- 
men, but neither Wilkinson nor Jiulge Junes thought it prudent 
to bring the felons to justice, and they were hurried off beyond 
tlie Mississippi. 

The late John Mason Brown of Louisville, in an elaborate 
attempt to vindicate his grandfather, John Brown, the Ken- 
tucky senator, from complicity in these Spanish conspiracies, sat- 
isfied himself that he successfully defended Innes and all 
except Wilkinson and Sebastian from the charges of baseness. 
" Lifted," he sa3'^s, " to its last analysis, the story shows that 
certainly there were not more than two consj)irators, Wilkinson 
and Sebastian. It does not seem that they communicated. 
They were base money-takers, both of them, but they made no 
proselytes, nor tried to." It is to be hoped that this explana- 
tion is true, but evidence is against it. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

1796-1798. 

Spain had, indeed, during the course of 1796, entered upon 
a system of delay very characteristic of her national humor, 
in carrying out the provisions of the treaty of San Lorenzo; 
but its ratification (April, 1796) had postponed, if it had not 
averted, danger from that quarter. But in the place of one 
disquietude had come another. French arrogance, which had 
received a temj)orary check by the suppression of Clark's exjje- 
dition and by the futility of Carondelet's ulterior plans, made 
evident early in the year, was again asserting itself. With the 
uncertain drift of diplomacy and through the wafting of pas- 
sions, the federal government was never quite sure that the pro- 
visions of Jay's treaty might not at any time become an obstacle 
to the continuance of the enforced and somewhat disheartening 
truce with England which, in April, was finally to be made 
operative. The public grew calmer because it was not informed ; 
and such events as the new treaty with Algiers, entered into 
just before the treaty with Spain, seemed to the casual observer 
indicative of a new success in European relations. In Febru- 
aiy, 1796, Congress congratulated Washington on his birthday, 
with more warmth because it was generally felt that he was 
entering very shortly upon his last year in office. The Presi- 
dent himself was taking a more roseate view of public afPairs 
than seemed warranted, and in March, ] 796, he was writing to 
a friend : " If the people have not abundant cause to rejoice at 
the happiness they enjoy, I know of no country that has. We 
have settled all our disputes, and are at peace with all nation's." 
This was true, but the prospect of a continuance of peace was 
not flattering. Pickering, at about the same moment, was pre- 
maturely planning for the garrisoning of Natchez, and prepar- 
ing to meet a new outbreak of the Creeks, between the enmity 



TENNESSEE. 559 

of whom and the retention of the Spanish posts he had not far 
to reach for reasons. 

Early in the year, the nearest white neighbors of that tribe 
had made a notable movement in their convention at Knoxville 
on January 11, 1796. Completing its business on February 6, it 
had announced to the world a constitution, based on that of 
North Carolina, but more republican, as Jefferson said, than any 
before framed, though in some particulars respecting tlie taxa- 
tion of lands it has been held to be too favorable to the rich. 
It had been made without any enabling act of Congress, and 
in defiance of the right of Congress to order the census which 
preceded it, and to determine whether the territory should be 
made an autonomy within the Union or without it. It had cre- 
ated a new State, ready for union, if Congress wanted it, but a 
new State in any event. The convention had had some remark- 
able men in it. Blount, who had sat in the federal convention of 
1787, presided over it, and he was destined to be its senator in 
Congress. James Robertson had been called to the chair when- 
ever the convention resolved itself into a committee of the whole. 
Andrew Jackson was there, soon to ride eight hundred miles 
on horseback to Philadelphia, and to claim a seat in the State's 
b(»half in the national House of Representatives. He was better 
Ivuown now than when he looked on and saw tlie escape of 
Sevier from his enemies at the backwoods court-house. Tipton, 
one of those enemies, was now here, his associate in the conven- 
tion ; but Sevier was not tliere, though destined in a few weeks 
to be their cliosen governor, and, later still, to be tui-ned to by 
Wasliington's successor as a brigadier in the qwinl war with 
France. The constitution gave and legalized the name of 
Tennessee to the inci])ient commonwealth. By Blount's agency 
the vexed and perennial question of the Mississippi, which was 
so near its settlement, was formulated as a fundamental law : 
" An equal particii^ation of tlie free navigation of the JVIissis- 
sippi is one of the inherent rights of the citizens of this State ; 
it cannot, therefore, be conceded to any prince, potentate, power, 
person or persons whatever." 

By the end of March, 1796, the State had assembled its first 
legislature, and by it the new constitution was forwarded to 
the President, who on April 8 laid it l)efore Congress. A 
month of hesitancy passed. The federalists, led by Ruf us King, 



560 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

rallied against its acceptance. They saw in it a trick to secure 
another electoral vote for Jefferson in the coming count. One 
of this party wrote : " The j)eople of that country have cashiered 
the temporary government, and self-created themselves into a 
State. One of their spurious senators has arrived, and has 
claimed his seat. No doubt this is one twig of the electioneer- 
ing cabal for Mr. Jefferson." Aaron Burr, who had been in 
the Senate since 1791, led the jiarty of advocates, and led them 
successfully. The bill for the admission of the new State came 
to a vote on May 6, but Burr's margin of victory was narrow. 
The President kept the question in doubt for some weeks, but 
finally approved the act on June 1. 

Another fateful question came, in the same early months of 
1796, to an issue. The legislature of Georgia, which was to 
wipe out the Yazoo scandal, convened in Januai*y, and a strong 
party in favor of canceling the vicious grants developed itself. 
Meanwhile, the corporate speculators had in many cases sold 
their rights under the threatened grants, and those of the Upper 
Mississippi Company were transferred to a company in South 
Carolina. The other companies sent agents to New England, 
and many ])rominent men invested in their shares, and Boston 
alone is said to have placed |!2,000,000 in this way. With the 
prospect of trouble from innocent purchasers, or from others not 
so guileless, the legislature, on February 13, passed a rescind- 
ing act, accompanying their decision with proofs of the corrup- 
tion and evidences of the unconstitutionality of the slaughtered 
grants. To give the end something of melodramatic effect, the 
old act was publicly burned, the fire being ignited b}' a burning- 
glass, in the effort to link the deprecation of heaven with that 
of the vindicators of justice. It is not necessary now to trace 
out the sequel. Jackson, the champion of the vindicators, says 
that he was " fired at in the papers, abused in the coffee-houses, 
and furnished a target for all the Yazoo scrijJ-holders, — but 
[he added] I have the people yet with me." His leadership 
led him into duels, and in one of them he was finally killed in 
1806. Meanwhile, the new purchasers organized for prosecut- 
ing their claims, and when Georgia finally ceded the territory 
to the United States, in 1802, the justice of their demands was 
left to the determination of Congress. 



ADET AND THE WEST. 561 

It was in the spring of 1796 that Adet, now the French 
minister in Phihidelphia, entered actively upon his scheme of 
wresting" the western country from the Union. He selected for 
his agents to traverse that region two Frenchmen : one, Gen- 
eral Victor Collot, who is described, in the instructions for his 
apprehension, as being six feet tall, forty years of age, and speak- 
ing English very well. The other — Warin, or Warren, as 
the same instructions name him — is described as over six feet 
high, thirty years old, lately a sub-engineer in the American 
service, and speaking English tolerably. The expenses of the 
mission of these spies were to be borne by the French govern- 
ment. They were to observe the military posts and make gen- 
eral observations on the conntry, which Collet's journal has 
preserved for us. They wei-e to select a spot for a military 
depot, and to make a list of influential persons whom they 
encountered. They were to sound the people on an alliance 
with France, and to point out how natural it would be for those 
beyond the mountains to seek a French connection. They were 
also told to express a preference for the election of Jefferson to 
the presidency, and this was natural. It was the belief that 
Gallatin, whose career in the whiskey insurrection had not been 
forgotten, had taken a map l)y Hutchins and marked out a 
route for these emissaries, even if he liad not suggested the 
movement to Adet. The whole project was a part of the 
resentment of France at the Jay treaty, which was held to have 
annulled the treaty of 1778. It was supposed to be in the 
interest of annexing Louisiana to France, and to give lier this 
larger domination in the Mississippi valley, — a scheme that 
Talleyrand, equal to any depth of infamy, had, as we have seen, 
formulated. 

In May, McHenry, now in the cabinet, informed St. (^lair 
of the departui-e of these spies, and h<)])ed he would discover 
ground for seizing their papers. Al)out the sanu; time, the 
republican faction were credited with an attempt, ostensibly for 
economy's sake, to abolish the major-generalship of the army, 
but really with the purpose of getting rid of Wayne and put- 
ting Wilkinson as the senior brigadier at the head of the army, 
as a more manageable person than Wayne. The death of the 
latter before the end of the year brought Wilkinson to the top 
more naturally, and the French faction doubtless knew him to 
be as purchasable by France as by S])ain. 



562 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

The Freiicli government, in March, 1796, had lodged with 
Monroe, in Paris, their complaints of the Jay treaty ; and when 
the tidings of the House's action, on April 30, in sustaining the 
treaty, reached France, the authorities of the seaports began a 
series of aggressions and condemnations of American vessels. 
By October, the exasperated Directory were determined on 
more offensive measures. Monroe advised the leaders that a 
war with the United States would throw the Americans into 
the arms of England, and set back the cause of liberty. This 
minister heard in August that France was planning a treaty 
with Spain, by which Louisiana and Florida would be surren- 
dered to French influence, and Canada was to be attacked, so 
as to surround the United States with alien interests. Monroe 
questioned the government, which promptly denied it. 

Meanwhile, Adet's spies were working in the west. Collot, 
in Kentucky, had fallen in with Judge Breckenridge, and was 
endeavoring to convince him how a French alliance could with- 
stand the authority of the United States. Passing on by the 
route which had been marked out for him, Collot made obser- 
vation of the portage between the Wabash and Maumee, where 
wagons were regularly conveying passengers, and saw how it 
" ought to be fortified, if the northwestern States ever make a 
schism." Descending the Ohio, he stopped at Fort Massac, 
and found it occupied by a hundred men, and eight twelve- 
j^ounders mounted in its four bastions. The channel, being on 
the opposite side of the river, showed him how it could be 
passed in the night. Caught making sketches, the commander, 
Captain Pike, arrested him, and he was only allowed to proceed 
by having an officer in company as long as he kejst on American 
soil. Passing up to the Illinois settlements, where he had 
hoped to discover the French eager for his counsels, he was cha- 
grined to find that the people had no qualities of the French 
but courage. Collot, Michaux, and Volney give a poor account 
of these degenerate French. " They live and look like sav- 
ages," says one. " Their thrifty American neiglibors had got 
the upper hand of them," says a second. Collot even says 
they had forgotten the succession of the calendar ; that they 
stubbornly adhered to old customs : that they did not recog- 
nize their privations ; that they were buried in superstitious 
ignorance, and lived the lives of indolent drunkards. 



WASHINGTON'S ADVICE. 563 

At St. Louis, Collot learned that both Caroiidelet and Pick- 
ering- had ordered his arrest, so that lie was safe on neither 
side of the river. An Amei-iean judge. at Kaskaskia, he said, 
had " spread the most idle and injurious tales respecting the 
French nation, and particularly respecting myself." 

St. Louis struck him as commanding in position the Missis- 
si})pi and the route to the Pacific by the Missouri, " with more 
facility, more safety, and with more economy for trade and 
navigation than any other given point in North America." Of 
its six hundred population, two hundred were able to bear arms, 
and all were French. They were, in the main, haj^py laborers, 
less degenerate than those he had seen in the Illinois region, 
and among them were prosperous merchants. The fort had 
been strengthened at the time of Genet's proposed raid, and the 
garrison of seventeen men now in it was ordered to retreat, if 
necessary, to New Madrid. 

Looking to a French irruption on the mines of Santa Fe, he 
found that it was practicable for two converging forces to fall 
upon them. One would ascend the Great Osage branch of the 
Missouri, and the other the Arkansas. The valley where Santa 
Fe was situated would bring the two armies near together, the 
one sixty miles and the other a hundred miles and more from 
the coveted goal. 

While Collot was thus marking out the lines of a French 
invasion of the Mississippi valley, Washington, in his farewell 
address (September 17, 1796), was uttering a sober warning to 
the western intriguers. The east finds, he says, and will still 
more find, in the west, " a valuable vent for the commodities 
which it brings from abroad, or manufactures at home," while 
the west will obtain from the east " the supplies requisite to its 
growth and comfort. ... It owes the secure enjoyment of in- 
dispensable outlets for its own productions to the Atlantic side 
of the Union. . . . Any other tenure by which the west can 
hold this advantage, either by its own strength or by connections 
with a foreign power, must be precarious. . . . The inhabitants 
of our western country have seen in the treaty with Spain, and 
in the universal satisfaction at that event, a decisive ])roof how 
imfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a 
])olicy in the general government and in the Atlantic States 
unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi." lie 



564 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

ure'es them to be deaf to advisers who would connect them with 
aliens. 

As the autumn advanced, the relations between Spain and 
England, which had long been strained, and which had so much 
induced the treaty of San Lorenzo, grew more and more irrita- 
ble. A year or so before, Jefferson had written to Morris in 
London to intimate to the British government that a balance of 
power was as necessary in America as in Europe, and any dis- 
turbance of it by England's seizing Louisiana in case of a rup- 
ture with Spain would cause extreme uneasiness in America. 
It was a common rumor at this time that an expedition from 
Montreal would be started against Louisiana, if the Spanish 
should venture on a war. CoUot heard of it on the Mississippi 
as to consist of two thousand British regulars, fifteen hundred 
militia, and a body of Indians, and he had given Gayoso warn- 
ing of it at Natchez. During the summer, an English spy 
liad been examining the Ohio River, and it was a question if 
England would respect American territory in case of a determi- 
nation to attack Louisiana. St. Clair wrote from Pittsburg, 
on September 6, about this emissary : " Connolly has left the 
country, after making, it is said, an accurate survey of tl;e 
Ohio, and sounding its depths in a number of places. He was 
stopped at Massac and his papers examined by the command- 
ing officer," and at the same time there were reports of English 
agents in Tennessee and Kentucky organizing military forces. 

War was declared by Spain against England on October 7, 
and not long after the declaration was received in London, Port- 
land wrote to Simcoe (October 24) to inquire what could be 
depended upon in Kentucky and the west. The current ques- 
tions now became complicated. Would England, with or with- 
out the sympathy of the United States, make a descent of the 
Mississippi upon New Orleans ? Would the Spanish, with or 
without the aid of the French, ascend the Mississippi, make 
another attempt to wrest the west from the LTnion, and dash 
upon Canada? The last country was full of rumors of French 
intentions, and Governor Prescott, in October, 1796, issued a 
warning proclamation. The possession by this time of the lake 
posts surrendered under the Jay treaty, which was the cause 
of this French animosity, put the United States in a position 
to resist either expedition, northward or southward, if it should 
seem best. 



ELLICOTT AND CARONDELET. 565 

The immediate effect upon the United States of this Angio- 
Spanish war was the excuse which Carondelet found in it to 
dehiy the surrender of Natchez and the other Mississippi posts, 
and to block the purpose of Andrew Ellicott, who had been 
designated by the President as the American commissioner for 
running the lines determined by the treaty of San Lorenzo. 
Ellicott had left Philadelphia on September 16, 1796, and near 
the end of October, he embarked all his stores and wagons on 
the Ohio. It was a low state of the river, and when he turned 
into the Mississippi, on December 18, he found himself sur- 
rounded by floating ice. He did not begin his further descent 
till January 21, 1797, when a detachment of American troops 
accompanied his flotilla. At New Madrid, before its crumbling- 
fort, he was stopped and shown a letter from Carondelet direct- 
ing tlie commandant to detain him till the forts were evacuated, 
which could not be done, as his excuse was, till the river had 
risen. He went on. At Chickasaw Bluff there was the same 
])oliteness and the same wide-eyed wonder when the treaty of 
San Lorenzo was mentioned. There were armed galleys hover- 
ing about in a rather inquisitive way. At Walnut Hills a can- 
non-shot sto]iped them, and lie found the same politeness and 
ignorance. On February 22, 1797, he met a messenger from 
Oayoso, who commanded at Natchez, saying that the evacuation 
had been delayed by the want of suitable vessels. The Span- 
ish governor advised him to leave his armament behind, if he 
proposed to come on to Natchez. Ellicott went on without his 
troops and reached Natchez on the 24th. Entering upon a con- 
ference, he finally secured a promise to begin the survey on 
March 19 ; and he sent forward a notice of his arrival to Ca- 
rondelet. Gayoso asked him to pull down the American flag- 
flying over liis camp, but he refused. 

On March 1, 1797, Carondelet arrived. He presented a new 
excuse for not evacuating the posts. It was not clear in his 
mind whether he should surrender the forts as they were, or 
should dismantle them first, and he must submit the question 
to the authorities in Madrid. 

There was in Natchez, with its luuidred variegated wooden 
houses, a mixed population of about four thousand, divided in 
sympathies, — a Spanish party, an English party, and an Amer- 
ican one. The Spanish party was really insignificant. The 



566 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

English party was made up of original British settlers, who had 
been joined by Tories from the States during the Revolution. 
The American party was mainly people whom the States for 
one reason or another had ejected from their communities. In 
the district about the town there may have been ten thousand 
souls, capable with the town of furnishing two thousand militia 
foot, and two hundred dragoons. 

It appearing that Gayoso was strengthening the fort and re- 
mounting guns, EUicott had offers of volunteers, coining from 
among the nine tenths of the people who were rejoicing in the 
prospect of relief from Spanish rule. While Ellicott hesitated 
about assuming any military control, he was determined to 
send up the river for his troops. It was not best to let the 
Spanish commander get too strong a hold upon the post. There 
was no neighboring height from which a cannonade could dis- 
po.ssess him of the post, and New Orleans, a hundred leagues 
away, was within reach for succor. Gayoso objected to having 
the American troops at hand, but Ellicott was firm, only that 
he was willing they should bivouac a few miles up from the 
town. Lieutenant Pope, who was in command of the escort, 
had been strengthening it by enlistments up the river, as he 
could find willing Americans in the neighborhood of Fort Mas- 
sac, where he had stopped. He had had orders from Wayne 
not to move forward till he had tidings of the evacuation ; but 
Ellicott's demand was pressing, and he descended the river, 
reaching the neighborhood of Natchez on April 24, 1797. 

It was now apparent that Spanish agents were working upon 
the Chickasaws and Choctaws to secure their aid in what looked 
like a struggle for possession ; but Ellicott was as wary as his 
opponent, and courted the Choctaws till he felt sure of their 
neutrality. At this point there was a new reason given by the 
Spaniards — not offered before — for delay, which was that 
news had been received of a contemplated British descent of 
the river, and they nmst be met before they reached New Or- 
leans. Gayoso in fact had first heard of this intended British 
attack from CoUot, when he passed down the river the pre- 
vious year. At that time, Collot had a marvelous tale to re- 
hearse. One Ghisholm — an Englishman, whom one shall soon 
know something about — was raising a force in Tennessee, 
which, with the aid of the Creeks and Cherokees and fifteen 



WILKINSON AND POWER. 567 

hundred Tories at Natchez, was to attack the Spanish, while 
the British from Canada, in conij)any with Brant and his Indi- 
ans, were to descend the Mississippi. It was now just about the 
time when, as Collot then said, tlie American invaders would 
be gathering- at Knoxville, where they had the countenance of 
the Governor of Tennessee. 

The Spanish surveyor arriving at this juncture, and the sur- 
veying party having no necessity of witnessing the Anglo- 
Spanish conflict, Ellicott thought there was a chance to begin 
his work. Gayoso, wlio was now strengthening his works at 
Walnut Hills, thought otherwise, and notified Ellicott, on May 
11, that the survey must be put off; and this decision was con- 
firmed by a proclamation which Carondelet himself issued on 
May 24. Ellicott protested, and enrollments of the townspeople 
began as if serious business was intended. A fortnight later, 
on June 7, 1797, a committee of the citizens assumed control of 
the town, all parties agreeing to be peaceable. Gayoso acqui- 
esced, since he could not do otlierwise, and exhorted the popu- 
lace to keep quiet till the differences could be settled. This 
revolutionary tribunal was displaced in a few days by another 
appointed by Gayoso at Ellicott's dictation, and Carondelet 
confirmed the choice. This was one of the last acts of Caron- 
delet, for he was soon on his way to Quito to assume another 
charge, and Gayoso ruled in his place, receiving his commission 
on July 26, 1797. 

This departing, short, fat, choleric, but good-humored gov- 
ernor was not to know the failure of another of his wily ])lans. 
He had, in May, 1797, once more sent his old emissary, Thomas 
Power, to Wilkinson, to ask him to keep back any additional 
American force, because he intended to hold Natchez till the 
British danger was j)assed, and he could hear from Madrid. 
Power was also to let the ohl Kentucky discontents understand 
that Spain had no intention of observing the San Loi-enzo 
treaty, and that if they would swing that State away from the 
Union, Spain was ready to make the most favorable terms with 
them. It was the old story. Kentucky constancy to Spanish 
interest was to be tested very shortly in an attack on Fort Mas- 
sac. The time, however, had passed for even a show of assent, 
and when Power reached Detroit, where Wilkinson was, that 
general made an appearance of arresting him, and hurried him 



5G8 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

out of clanger. This was in September, 1797 ; in the follow- 
ing January, Power was back in New Orleans rejjorting- his 
failure to Gayoso. 

While Power and Wilkinson, conscious that the end of Sj^an- 
ish machinations in the west had come, were talking over at 
Detroit the failure of their hopes, Ellicott, at Natchez, was 
receiving (September, 1797) from his government the disclos- 
ure of another plan, to liidc the turbulent west with British 
aid in an attempt to wrest New Orleans and the adjacent re- 
gions from the hands of Spain. This intelligence was accom- 
panied by the announcement that Blount, now a senator from 
Tennessee, and shown to be a prime mover in this treasonable 
scheme, had been expelled the previous July by his associates 
in Congress, with but a single dissentient voice, and had hur- 
ried away from Philadelphia to escape further condemnation. 
Ellicott, on the receipt of this news, threw a new responsibility 
upon his committee of safety at Natchez, when he left it to its 
vigilance to detect and thwart any lingering treason in connec- 
tion with the same plot, which might exist in that neighbor- 
hood, of which, as we have seen, Collot had heard a vague 
rumor the previous year. 

This dying spasm of western discontent needs to be eluci- 
dated. Blount had probably numerous accomplices. They have 
been reckoned at about thirty, upon whom more or less suspi- 
cion rested. They included a certain schemer, one Dr. Ro- 
mayne. Colonel Orr of Tennessee, Colonel Whitely of Ken- 
tucky, and a dubious personage, named Chisholm. On April 
21, 1797, Blount had written to Cai-ey, the official interpreter 
of the Cherokees, in a way which showed that the southern In- 
dians were to be used in an attack on New Orleans, while a 
British fleet ascended the Mississi])pi, and a force of four thou- 
sand frontiersmen, directed l)y Blount and aided by Colonel 
Anthony Hutchins, a hot-headed officer of the English service, 
who was somewhat popular in the Natchez country, were to 
descend that river. 

After the plan was known, there was a divei"sity of opinion 
as to the end the plot was intended to subserve. Some, as one 
said, supposf^d the real object was to alarm the Spaniards, and 
when the intriguers had created serious apprehension in the 
Spanish mind, the movers were to offer their services to arrest 



FRENCH INTRIGUES. 569 

or oppose the progress of the plan, and jilace the Spanish 
authorities under such obligations as to reap immense advan- 
tages to themselves. The truth was probably moi-e apparent, 
for the project was most likely intended to forestall a plot of 
France to secure possession of Florida and Louisiana, which 
Talleyrand had urged as an offset to the effects of Jay's treaty. 
A transfer of the trans-Mississipjii region to France was held 
to be inimical to the interests of the land speculators of the 
west, who thought, by placing that region under the trustee- 
ship of England, to enhance the reciprocal advantages of an 
independent state, holding both banks of the Mississippi. It 
had for a long time been suspected that France was negotiating 
with Spain to renew her old hold on the Mississippi. As early 
as November, 1796, Oliver Wolcott felt convinced that the 
transfer had been secretly effected " with the object of having 
an influence over the western country." Kufus King, in Lon- 
don, was growing to think that the persistent grasj) of Spain on 
the river posts was an indication that this had taken place. 
Liston, the British minister in Philadelphia, writing to Gov- 
ernor Prescott of Canada, warned him that France was not to 
be content with Louisiana, but was longing also for her old 
dominion over the country north of the Great Lakes. He be- 
lieved that Adet had sent thither a skulking emissary, who was 
'Jiassing under the name of Burns, and was seeking to excite 
the Canadians to revolt. The dread of this in Canada grew so 
before the year closed that it was feared that Lower and Upper 
Canada would be assailed, on the one hand from Vermont and 
on the other from the west, where Collot was numbering the 
western Indians and thought to instigate them to the attack. 
Rumor laid out a broad plan of attack. A French fleet was to 
ascend the St. Lawrence in July, 1797, while the »Jacobins were 
to muster the invading force along the American frontier. In 
March, Liston found everything dark. " The damned French 
rogues," he wrote, " are playing the devil with this countr}^, as 
they have done with all the world ; but when things are at the 
worst, they must mend." 

Just before this, Pickering had written (February, 1797) to 
Rufus King that the change in sovereignty over Louisiana 
would be fraught with danger to the United States. The elec- 
tion of John Adams to the presidency the previous November 



570 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

(1796) and the defeat of Jefferson, the friend of France, in 
spite of Adet's warning that a republican defeat would estrange 
his country, had moved the French Directory to action meant, 
as Barlow reported, " to be little short of a declaration of war." 
In the spring of 1797, it was known that the Directory had 
ordered Pinckney away from Paris. Hamilton wrote back to 
King, on April 8, that " it portends too much a final rupture 
as the only alternative to an ignominious submission." Adet 
at this time, leaving for France, said there would be no war, 
but the federalists believed he only intended to prevent the 
Americans preparing for a conflict. Fisher Ames was urging 
a bold front. Robert Goodloe Harper, in a pamphlet, was 
going over the story of the past insincerity of France, and feli- 
citously divining her treachery in the days of the American Re- 
volution, in the way that abundant evidence, divulged in later 
days, has established it. As the summer began, Pickering was 
impressed with the French intentions, and on June 27, 1797, 
he wrote to King : " We are not without apprehension that 
France means to regain Louisiana and to renew tlie ancient 
plan of her monarch, of circumscribing and encircling what now 
constitute the Atlantic States," — thus reinforcing the view of 
Harper. The French view was exactly expressed by Rochefou- 
cault-Liancourt, when he said that " the possession of Louisi- 
ana by the French would set bounds to the childish avarice of 
the Americans, who wish to grasp at everything." 

It was this })revailing belief, going back to the previous 
autumn (1796), that had aroused Blount to the opportunity 
which he desired to make of advantage to the west. His move- 
ments and those of his associates, even before he wrote his 
letter in April to Carey, had been brought to the notice of 
Yrujo, the Spanish minister, and he had directed to it the atten- 
tion of Pickering. He added evidences, not only of a purpose 
to attack New Orleans, but of a plan to invade Florida from 
Georgia, wliile another force from Canada feU upon St. Louis 
and New Madrid. 

The situation all around was perplexing for the administra- 
tion. Spain was pursuing a dubious course on the Mississippi. 
There were Franco-western designs on Canada. There were 
Anglo-western aims at New Orleans. 

Liston, the British minister, when appealed to, acknowledged 



BLOUNT'S INTRIGUE. 571 

that lie liad been approaelied by irresponsible persons in regard 
to a British attack on New Orleans ; but he said he had thrown 
discredit on it, and had referred the proposition, with his disap- 
proval, to his government. The ministry's response not coming, 
one John Chisholm, a Scotch adventurer, who has been already 
referred to, and who had conferred with Liston, had been, in 
March, 1797, sent to London by that minister, who had not 
only paid the fellow's passage-money, but had also, it was later 
believed, given him two sets of letters. One set was to accredit 
him on account of this nefarious business, and was prepared 
to be thrown overboard in case of necessity ; and the other set 
concerned some ostensible mercantile transactions. King, in 
London, was warned to keep w^atch on Chisholm, and he soon 
reported that he was leading a scandalous life, and that the 
British government for a while paid his petty obligations, but 
that later he was thrown into jail for debt. Grenville, how- 
ever, protested to King that the ministry had promptly rejected 
the whole proposition. 

Meanwhile, Blount's letter, and his expulsion from the Senate 
in July, had set everybody in America wondering how wide- 
spread the defection was. Between the revelation of the plot 
and the final act of the Senate, Wolcott, on July 4, 1797, had 
written : " Our western frontiers are thi-eatened with a new In- 
dian war. French and Spanish emissaries swarm though the 
country. There is reason to believe that a western or ultra- 
montane republic is meditated. ... It is certain that overtures 
have been made to the British government for support, and 
there is every reason to believe, short of positive proof, that 
similar overtures have been made to Spain and France. The 
British will not now support the project." The opposite par- 
ties, now evenly balanced, as the election of Adams by a bare 
majority showed, and bitterer than ever against each other, 
scanned eagerly the names which were hinted at as associated 
with Blount. The federalists were rejoiced to find them all 
Jacobins. Boudinot expressed their opinions : " All who have 
been mentioned as concerned in the business are violent Jaco- 
bins, professed enemies to Great Britain, and who have been 
continual advocates for the French, and always vociferating a 
British faction. . . . We are not without fear that this may be 
a scheme of the democrats and Frenchified Americans to ruin 



572 2'HE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

England in the American opinion, and give the Spaniards an 
excuse to break their treaty with ns." 

It is always unsafe to be determinate on diplomatic myste- 
ries, nor is there evidence that what Hawkesworth represented 
to King at a later day as the jjurpose of the British ministry 
was closely connected with this Blount undertaking. His lord- 
ship said that the ministry had indeed considered a project of 
seizing Louisiana, and might perhaps have used the British 
army then in Egypt for the object. Their purpose, he pro- 
fessed, was not so much acquisition of territory as to find in the 
success of the expedition a ground for securing other advan- 
tages at the peace. Colonel Trumbull, who was at this time in 
England, wrote to urge the United States' seizing Louisiana 
and Florida, and emancipating Mexico. He at the same time 
expressed the opinion that the federal government might count 
on the English navy to blockade on the Gulf, while the Ameri- 
cans did the work by land. 

After the Blount plot had been discovered, the summer 
passed in Philadelphia with as much uncertainty as before. 
Pickering and Yrujo kept up their correspondence, and finally, 
in Augnst, the Spanish minister wrote what Jay called " a fac- 
tious and indecent letter," which led Pickering to say that only 
a change in the Spanish humor could restore confidence and lead 
the United States to forget the past. The old suspicion still 
prevailed, and the procrastinating policy of Gayoso with Elli- 
cott was held to be only a putting off to allow France to assert 
a sovereignty in Louisiana, which it was presumed she had 
already acquired. In November, 1797, King, in London, re- 
ported to Pickering that the Prince of Peace had lately declared 
that the Directory of France had demanded Louisiana, and 
that the court of Spain found " itself no longer in a condition 
to refuse." This was what Hamilton declared " jjlundering at 
discretion." 

The news was indeed premature, for the treaty of San Ilde- 
fonso was three years off, and fortunately there was an interval 
left in which Spain could redeem her honor with the United 
States, and lead America, in Pickering's phrase, to forget the 
past. In November, Colonel Grandprie, who, under orders 
fi'om Madrid, had arrived in November in Natchez, to take com- 
mand, was ignored by the committee, and when, in December, 



THE MISSISSIPPI TERRITORY. 573 

1797, fresh United States troops, vinder Captain Guy on, joined 
Ellicott at Natchez, it was a warning- to Gayoso that he couhl 
not overlook. Events now moved rapidly, as they usually do 
when Spanish obstinacy gives way to fear. In Januar}^ 1798, 
Gayoso issued orders for the evacuation of Natchez, Walnut 
Hills, and the other posts north of 31°. Ellicott was notified 
on January 10. After the usual Spanish torpidity, finally, on 
March 30, under the cover of the night, and leaving everything 
uninjured, the Spanish troops filed out, and the next morning- 
the American flag was run up. The Spanish troops retired 
downstream, and there was no place but Baton Rouge left for 
Gayoso to make a stand against an up-river approach. This 
place was but thirty miles above Iberville River, which bounded 
New Orleans inland on the north. 

The American Republic was now, after fifteen years' waiting, 
in possession of the territory in the southwest awarded to it by 
the Treaty of Independence. We have seen that it had waited 
thirteen years in the north to get control of the lake posts. 
Congress at once (April, 1798) set up the Mississip])i Terri- 
tory, covering the territory so long in dispute, and Winthrop 
Sargent, turning over the secretaryship of the northwest ter- 
ritory to William Henry Harrison, was sent to organize the 
government. He arrived at Natchez on August 6. Three 
weeks later (August 26), Wilkinson, as general of the Ameri- 
can army, and bearing- in his bosom the secrets that made his 
prominence a blot both on himself and his government, ari'ived 
at Natchez with a little army of occupation. Meanwliile, Elli- 
cott had left, on April 9, to begin his survey, and for two years 
was engaged in the work. 

So ends the story of the rounding out of the territorial in- 
tegrity of the Rei)ublic, as Franklin, Adams, and eJay had 
secured it in 1782, against the mischievous indirection of her 
enemies, French, Spanish, and British. 
. W^ith a country completed in its bomids, the American 
character needed a corresponding rounding of its traits. Jay, 
in a letter to Trumbull, October 27, 1797, had divined its 
necessities : " As to politics, we are in a better state than we 
•were ; but we are not yet in a sound state. I think that nation 
is not in a sound state whose jnii-ties are excited by objects 



574 THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED. 

interesting only to a foreign power. I wish to see our people 
more Americanized, if I may use that expression ; until we 
feel and act as an independent nation, we shall always suffer 
from foreign influence." Hamilton wrote to King in a similar 
spirit : " The conduct of France " — and he might have added of 
Spain and Britain — " has been a very powerful medicine for the 
political diseases of the country. I think the community im- 
proves in soundness." 

Not long before this, Tench Coxe, of Philadelphia, made a 
survey of the condition to which the United States had attained : 
" The public debt is smaller in proportion to the present wealth 
and population than the public debt of any other civilized 
nation. The United States, including the operations of the 
individual States, have sunk a much greater proportion of the 
public debt in the last ten years than any nation in the world. 
The expenses of the government are very much less in projjor- 
tion to wealth and numbers than those of any nation in Eu- 
rope." The United States, with its rightful proportions se- 
cured, was now fairly started on an independent career. 



INDEX. 



INDEX. 



Abbott, at Vineennes, 112 ; at Detroit, 

Aljiiiiidon, presbytery, 328. 

Adam, Robert, 61. 

Adams, John, and the Transylvania 
movement, 97 ; going' abroad, Ki.'S ; in 
Paris, is;; ; his influence on the treaty 
(17S2), 2(IS; on tlie date of the treaty 
(17S2), 2I!>; his i)rediftions, 221); in 
London demands the posts, 241 ; on 
the loyalists, 24o ; sees Brant, 27o ; 
praise of the British Constitution, 278 ; 
Davila, 408 ; elected President. 5()8. 

Adams, J. Q., at The Hague, 479. 

Adet, arrives, 4()() ; intrigues at the West, 
THJl ; returns to F'rance, 570. 

Alamance, battle, 78. 

Alexandria (Va.), as a port for the West, 
248 ; western routes from, map, 249 ; 
Washington's estimate, 230 ; commis- 
sioners at, 2."i(i. 

AlexdiKlnd (idzHte, ."570, 

Alibainons, iU, ;>2, Kil. 

Allegliany Mountain routes, 410. 

Alleghany River, 511. 

Allen, Andrew, (i(). 

American, as a designation, (!. 

American Anti-slavery Society, 289. 

American Bottom, 25 ; map, 27. 

American Gazetteer, .'SI, 50;i. 

American Military Pocket Atlas, 214. 

American Philosophical Society, and 
western discovery, 533. 

American Pioneer, 293. 

Ames, Fisher, his speech on the Jay 
treaty, 481. 

Anian, .Straits of, 104, 238. 

Arunda, Count d', 151 ; his views of the 
western limit of the United States, 
210. 

Arnislrong. Ensign, 270. 

Arniild. IJcncdict, liis treason, 184; on 
the James River, 190. 

Assiniboils River, 104. 

Aubry, Governor, at New Orleans. 33. 

Augusta (Ga.), 9; Indian treaties at, 
327. 

Awandoe Creek, 20. 

Bancroft, Dr. Edward, in Paris, 147, 153. 

Bancroft, George, llil. 

Banks, Sir.Iosepli, 2.">9. 

Barker, Eliliu, map of Kentucky, 52(5. 

Barlow, Joel, agent for tlie Scioto Com- 
pany, 311; his maj). 311-313; and the 
Scioto Company, 402. 



Bathurst, Lord, 48. 

Baton Rouge, 109, 57."> ; taken by Galvez, 
l(i2. 

Bayagoulas, 109. 

Bean, William, 44, 77. 

Beatty, Charles, 43. 

Beaulieu, in America. 34. 

Beaumarchais, 14(), 147, 152. 

Beaver, a Delaware, 13. 

Beaver Creek, 248, 295. 

Beck, L. E., Gazetteer, 25, 172. 

BeckAvith, Major, 394. 

Belpre, 421 ; position of, 297. 

Bernard, Francis, 4. 

Bernoulli, Daniel, 512. 

Bland, Colonel, his ordinance for a west- 
ern St^ite, 244. 

Bledsoe's Lick, 123. 

Blennerhasset's Island, 29(). 

Bloomer, Captain,- 102. 

Blount, William, made governor, 376 ; 
seeks conference with the ('herokees, 
51(), 523 ; in the Tennessee Convention, 
559 ; expelled from U. S. Senate for 
intrigue, 568 ; his treasonable plot, 
5()8. 

Blount College, 529. 

Blue Licks, battle, 204. 

Bienville, in Paris, 34. 

Big Bellies (tribe), 4(i8. 

Big Bottom, 421. 

Bingham, AVilliam, 227. 

Bird, Captain Henry, 139 ; his raid, 175. 

Board of Trade, and the western move- 
ment, 44. 

B(nme, Carte cles Treize Etats Unis, 210, 
211. 

Bonvouloir, 145, 146. 

Boone, Daniel, character, 44 ; portrait, 
45 ; life l)y Filson. 44 ; goes West, 77, 
80; s:ives warning of Dnnniore war, 
81; captured, 12:1; escapes, 123; de- 
fends Boonesborough, 123 ; helps Fil- 
son, 331. 

Boonesborough, founded, 82; plan, 83; 
attacked. 111 ; defended, 123. 

Bor4, Etienne de, 551. 

Boston, sentiment on the Jay treaty, 477. 

Bostonuais, li;'>, 142. 

Botetourt, Lord, 50. 

Boudinot, Elias, 227, 230, 237. 

Boundaries, natural versus astronomical, 
2<)0, 2()2. 

Boundaries of the ITnited States, out- 
lined by Congress, 160, 163 ; left to the 
decision of France, 200 ; effect of events 



578 



INDEX. 



upon, 203 ; influence of England upon. 
205; as fixed, 209, 218 ; by the St. 
Croix, 218 ; alternative lines for the 
northern limits, 219 ; rectifications 
hoped for by the British, 240. 

Bouquet, 7, 30, 293. 

Bowen, Clarence W., 533. 

Bowles, William Augustus, 384 ; arrested 
by Carondelet, 521. 

Bowman, Colonel John, 111, 120 ; raid- 
ing, 138. 

Buchanan's Station, attacked, 523. 

Buffalo (bison), 295, 328, 401. 

Bull, Colonel, of Georgia, 92. 

Bullitt, Captain Thomas, 59. 

Bidlock, Governor, 92. 

Bradford, John, 357. 

Bradstreet, General John, and the Ca- 
nadians, 5 ; bargains for Indian lands, 
(10. 

Brant, Joseph, raiding, 194 ; would at- 
tack Flirt Bitt, 204; feelings at the 
peace (ITS.;). SM ; his disafiV'ction, 271 ; 
in England, 273 ; in council at Niagara, 
273 ; dejected, 274 ; sends an appeal to 
Congress, 276; on the situation, 304; 
withdraws from the Fort Harmar 
Council, 309 ; and the St. Clair cam- 
paign, 424 ; his activity, 430 ; on the 
Presqu'Isle question, 437 ; in Phila- 
delphia, 442 ; with the Miamis, 447 ; 
confers with the American commis- 
sioners, 448. 

Brehni, Captain, 138. 

Brodhead, Colonel, sent to the frontier, 
124 ; then to Wyoming region. 124 ; 
joins Mcintosh, 124 ; succeeds Mcin- 
tosh, 139 ; raids along the Alleghany, 
140 ; hoping to attack Detroit, 140, 
177 -relations with G. R. Clark, 170 ; 
at Pittsburg, 177 ; to cooperate with 
Clark, 191 ; trouble with Gibson, 193 ; 
retires from Fort Pitt, 195. 

Brissot, J. P., on the Scioto Company, 
402 ; portrait, 403 ; Commerce of Amer- 
ica, 403. 

Brown, Jacob, 79. 

Brown, John, .5.38 ; his conference with 
Gardoqui, 362 ; in the Kentucky Con- 
vention, 369. 

Brown, John Mason, in defence of John 
Brown, 557. 

Brownsville, '2'A. 

Bruff, Captain James, 483. 

Brunei, Isambard, 514. 

Bryant's Station, 204. 

Burbeck, Major, at Mackinac, 483. 

Bui^oyne, captured, 115, 117. 

Burgoyne's Convention troops, 12(), 141. 

J3urke, Edmund, and the westward 
movement, 48; and New York, G5 ; 
French Revolution, 409. 

Burnaby, in Virginia, 11. 

Jiurnett's Hill, 20. 

Burnhani, Major John, 404. 

Burr, Aaron, advocates the admission of 
Tennessee, 5(i0. 

Bury, Viscount, 6. 

Bushnell, David, 514. 



Butler, General "lichard, ('£, 90, 256, 
2()S ; and the mii'tia of Pennsylvania, 
418 ; under St. Clair, 428. 

Butler's Rangers, 128. 

Cahokia, 25, 120 ; Clark at, 174. 

Caldwell, Captain, 204. 

Callender, his malice, 478. 

Calv(5, 172. 

Camden, Gates's defeat, ISl. 

Cameron, Indian agent, 79 ; banding the 
Southern tribes, 89 ; among the South- 
ern tribes, 136. 

Campbell, Colonel Arthur, 384. 

Campbell, Colonel William, would build 
a fort on the Tennessee, 178. 

Campbell, General, sent to Pensacola, 
160 ; captured at Pensacola, 189. 

Campbell, Major, at Fort Miami, 459. 

Canada, French in, 63 ; proportion of 
English and French in, 63 ; the French 
population asks to have the "old 
bounds of Canada" restored, 64; 
threatened by Lafayette, 159 ; to be 
admitted to the Confederation at her 
own pleasure, 167 ; discontented with 
the treaty (1782), 216 ; her merchants 
disconcerted at the treaty (1782), 219, 
2.37; her trade, 219, 237 ; French in- 
trigues in, 5(38. 

Canajoharie, 251. 

Cannon, the first used in Indian warfare, 
175. 

Carey, American Atlas, 382, 474, 516, 
,52(i, 544. 

Carleton, Sir Guy, at Quebec, 23, 63 ; 
goes to England, ()3 ; deprived of the 
charge of the upper lakes, 127 ; with- 
drawing troops from the Atlantic coast, 
240. 

Carmichael in Madrid, 183. 

CaroUna traders, 9. 

Carondelet succeeds MircS, 520 ; his in- 
trigues in Kentucky, 557 ; their failure, 
557 ; delays Ellicott, 565 ; retires, 567. 

Carroll, Charles, 75. 

Carver, Jonathan, on the American Bot- 
tom, 25 ; his career, 101 ; portrait, 102 ; 
at the site of St. Paul, 102 ; his maps, 
103-105 ; his supposed provinces, 103 ; 
returns East, 104 ; Travels, 105, 214 ; 
map from his Travels, 215. 

Cataraqui, 242. 

Catawba country, 10. 

Catawba River, 77. 

Catawbas, 88 ; join the North Carolinians 
against the Cherokees, 93. 

Cayahoga River, 255 ; its character, 293. 

Ceioron, 129. 

Centinel of the North West, 539. 

Charles III. (Spain), 1.59. 

Charleston (S. C), to be attacked, 89 ; a 
rising of the Indians to be simultane- 
ous, 89 ; it fails, 92 ; surrendered, 138 ; 
attacked (1780), 181. 

Charleston (Va.), .59. 

Chastellux, Chevalier de, 251. 

Chatham, Lord, and the use of Indians 
in war, 127. 



INDEX. 



579 



Cheat River, 250. 

('lieat Kiver route, 254. 

Clierokee River (Teunessee River), 10, 
20. 

Clierokees, 541! ; and Iroquois, 9 ; meet 
Governor Tryon, 10 ; war with the 
northern tribes, 14 ; invade Illinois, 2(>; 
map of their country, ;!1 ; their claims 
favored, 55 ; opposed by Franklin, 5(1 ; 
lease land to the Watauga settlement, 
79 ; treaty with Henderson, 82 ; make 
land cessions, SH ; ready for war, S9 ; 
their settlements, 92 ; their numbers, 
92, ;iS'_' ; attacked by the whites, 92 ; 
brought to a peace, 93 ; cede lands, 95 ; 
Robertson among, 143 ; their claim to 
the Kentucky region invented, 1(17 ; 
rising (1780) are defeated, 178 ; active 
(1781), 192 ; their forays upon the Ten- 
nessee and Cumberland settlements, 
381, 382 ; relations with the authori- 
ties, 382 ; on the Scioto, 491 ; at Phila- 
delphia, 520-547 ; attacked by Orr, 
.547. 

Chicago, 2t)4, 491 ; American settlers at, 
203. 

Chickamaugas, 334, 382 ; recalcitrant, 
93 ; settle lower down the Tennessee, 
93 ; attacked, 136 ; attack Donelson's 
flotilla, 179. 

Chickasaws, 88, 382 ; invade Illinois, 20 ; 
tribe, 30; map of their country, 31, 
522 ; favor the Americans, 54() ; make 
peace with the Creeks, 552. 

Chillicothe, settled, .500. 

Chillicothe (Indian village), 170. 

Chippewa River, 104. 

Chippewas, their country, 39 ; on the 
Ohio, 43. 

Chisholm, John, rumors about, 500, 507 ; 
sent to London, 571. 

Chiswell mines, 10. 

Choctaws, 9, 29, 30, 382 ; map of their 
country, 31 ; their bucks, 54(5. 

Choiseul, 4 ; and England, 34 ; rejoiced 
at the American revolt, 30. 

Christian, Colonel \Viniam, 93. 

Cincinnati, Chirk at its site, 170 ; founded, 
315 ; seat of government for the coun- 
try, 401 ; population, 498. 

Circourt, on the treaty (1782), 223. 

Clare, Lord. 40. 

Clark, Daniel, 181. 

Clark, Ge(n'ge Rogers, his conquest of 
Illinois, 2; with Cresap, 0(i ; builds 
Fort Fincastle, 72; in Kentucky, IKi; 
sent to Williatnsl)urg, 110; sends spies 
to the Illinois, 117 ; again at Williams- 
burg, 117; his instructions, 117; de- 
scends the Ohio, 118; liis face, 118 ; his 
land march, 1 18 ; captures Kaskaskia, 
119, 129; goes to Cahokia, 120; aided 
by Vigo, 121; and by Pollock, 121; 
attacks Vincennes, 133, 135 ; leaves 
Helm in command, l.">5 ; at Kaskas- 
kia, 13() ; sends dispatches. 130; aban- 
dons plan of attacking Detroit. i;!7; 
disappointed, 141 ; his men promised 
lands, 141 ; at the falls of the Ohio, 



141 ; his letters, 141 ; his memoirs, 141 ; 
sti-uggling to maintain himself in the 
Illinois country, 143 ; his expenditures, 
143 ; Pollock's aid, 143 ; bounty lands 
for his soldiers, 18() ; builds Fort Jef- 
ferson, 174 ; at Cahokia, watching St. 
Louis, 174 ; ranging with a Kentucky 
force, 175 ; relations with Colonel Bi-od- 
head, 170 ; at the Ohio Falls, 177 ; com- 
manding in Kentucky, 178 ; his aims 
(1781), 190; aidhig Steuben, 190; his 
instructions (Dcceiuber, 1780), 191; 
moves down the < )hio. 193 ; inactive at 
the falls, 1'.I4 ; his hold on the Illinois 
country, 195 ; his conquest abandoned 
by Congress, 201 ; at the falls, 203 ; in- 
vades the Miami country, 204 ; effect 
of his conquest on the peace (1782), 
213 ; cost to Virginia of his conquest, 
247 ; Indian commissioner, 208 ; leads 



Kentuckians across the Ohio, 2 



robs 



Spanish merchants, 275 ; his grant on 
the Ohio, 332 ; attacks the Wabash 
tribes, 345 ; seizes the stock of a Span- 
ish trader at Vincennes, 347 ; to com- 
mand on the ]Mississi|)i)i, 378 ; with the 
French faction, 5.')'_', 538. 

Clark, William, 4.55. 

Cleaveland, Moses, 502. 

Cleveland, 204 ; settled, 502. 

Clinch River, 81. 

Clinton, Governor, 229. 

Colden, on New England, 4. 

Coles, (Tovernor, 28;). 

Collot, Victor, Journey to North Amer- 
ica, 50 • map from his Atlas, 291 ; 
Journal in North America, 444; ar- 
rested, 551 ; intrigues at the West, 
.5()0. 

Colonies, English views of, 41. 

Columbia River, 104 ; its existence sus- 
pected by the Spanish, 238 ; discovered 
bj' a Boston shii), 239, 392, 533. 

Columbian Magazine, 209, 324. 

Committee of Secret Correspondence, 
145. 

Conestoga wagons, 296. 

Confederation, weakness of the, 188. 

Confederation, Articles of, 1()7 ; delays in 
adopting, 109, 170. 

Congress, deceived as to French and 
Spanish aims, l(i4 ; sends Jay to Spain, 
104 ; grants western lands as bounties, 
1()8 ; firm on the Mississijipi question, 
183 ; weakening, 184, 188 ; and the 
land cessions, 180; discredits Virginia's 
claims, 200 ; supine before the Span- 
ish demand, 200 ; awakes to the situa- 
tion and votes to yield nothing, 201 ; 
affirms tiie succession of the confeder- 
ated States to the territorial rights of 
the several colonies, 205 ; seeks to have 
the States quitclaim their western 
lands, 207 ; becomes powerless after 
the war, 228 ; demands the posts, 234 ; 
petitioned for survey of Ohio lauds for 
soldiers. 244 ; ]>rohil)its occn])ation of 
Indian lands, 245 ; accepts land ces- 
sions without inquiry into title, 246 ; 



580 



INDEX. 



considers the Virginia proposal, 24G ; 
opposed to settlements on unsurveyed 
lands, 271 ; raises troops in New Eng- 
land, 274 ; its financial obligations, 282 ; 
establishes value of the American dol- 
lar, 2112 ; in collapse, 344. See Conti- 
nental Congress. 

Connecticut, dispute with Pennsylvania, 
22 ; settlers at Natchez from, 110 ; 
offers a qualified cession of western 
lands, 18(5 ; her western lands, 2(i4 ; 
dispute with Pennsylvania, 2()4 ;^ cedes 
her western lands, 2li4 ; her Western 
Reserve, 264 ; reservation in Ohio, 500 ; 
Firelands, 500. 

Connecticut Land Company, 500. 

Connolly, Dr. (Colonel) John, 52 ; and Vii- 
ginia's dispute with Pennsylvania, (i5 ; 
at Pittsburg, arousing the Indians, 85 ; 
his varied movements. 8(1; his plans 
of seizing Pittsburg, 80 ; (captured, 
8(i ; intriguing, 308 ; an informer, 3(57 ; 
sounding the Ohio, 564. 

Connor, James, 358. 

Continental Congress, action on the Que- 
bec Bill, 75 ; address to Canadians, 75 ; 
sends commission to Canada, 75 ; ad- 
dress to English synijiathizers, 75 ; 
creates three Indian dejjartments, 85. 

Continental money, depreciation of, 163, 
188. 

Conway, Moncure D., 187. 

Cook, Captain James, his voyage, 238 ; 
his journals, 238 ; accounts of his voy- 
age, 390. 

Cooper, Thomas, 478. 

Copper ore, 323. 

Corn title of lands, 49. 

Coruplanter, the Seneca chief, and Wash- 
ington, 424, 434 ; at the council of the 
Miamis, 443. 

Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief, at Point 
Pleasant, 73 ; wavering, 114 ; mur- 
dered, 114. 

Cornwallis, Lord, his plans, 138 ; surren- 
ders. 188, 202, 203. 

Coshocton, 192. 

Cowan, John, 59. 

Cox, Zachary, 515. 

Coxe, Tench. 574. 

Crab Orchard, 99. 

Craig, Major, 204. 

Craig, N. B., Olden Time, 197. 

Cramahe, in Canada, 63. 

Crawford, John, 271. 

Crawford, CJolonel William, sent West by 
Washington, 43 ; on the Monongahela, 
50; at Fort Pitt, llti ; at Wheeling, 
148 ; killed, 204. 

Creeks, 30, .382 ; map of their country, 
31, 383 ; in the Revolution, 88 ; unite 
with Cherokees in land cessions, 88 ; 
their savagery, 88 • aid the Georgians, 
92 ; and the North Carolina govern- 
ment, _ 328 ; in the Oconee war, .'WO ; 
war with, imminent, 544 ; attacked by 
Sevier, 544 ; numbers, 54(). 

Cresap, Colonel Michael, buys ludian 
lands, 44 ; on the Monongahela. 50 ; 



a leader, 66; accused of cruelty, 72; 
g')es to Boston, 86. 

Crevecoeur, Lettres cfun Cultivateur, 66 ; 
maps from, 66, 67, 258, 259, 293-295 ; 
Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie, map 
from, 299-301. 

Croghan, George, sent to England, 8 ; at 
Fort Pitt, 13, 44 ; at Fort Stanwix, 15 ; 
on Indian trade, 23 ; mediator with 
the Indians, 53 ; to warn the Indians of 
a new colony on the Ohio, 57 ; agent of 
the Walpole Company, 60 ; trying to 
support the Indians, 61 ; living on the 
AUeghanj', 72. 

Crows (the Indian tribe), 468. 

Crow's Station, 99. 

Cruzat, 326. 

Cumberland district, 143 ; Robertson ar- 
rives in, 143 ; population (1780), 180 ; 
found to be within tlie North Carolina 
lines, 180; articles of association, 180 ; 
perils from Indian raids, 180 ; Robert- 
son the leader of, 180 ; made a county, 
180 ; population (1783), 328 ; its isola- 
tion, 334. 

Cumberland Gap, 99, 328. , . '• 

Cumberland Road, 252. '' 

Cutler, Manasseh, his character, 281 ; ap- 
plies to Congress for land, 282 ; stands 
for the prohibition of slavery, 283 ; 
leagues with Duer, 292 ; favors St. 
Clair, 292 ; and the Ohio associates, 
310 ; his questionable conduct, 311 ; 
his description of the Ohio country, 
l>]4 ; on the future steamboat, 317. 

D'Abbadie, Governor, 34. 

Dane, Nathan, 281 ; on the passage of 
tlie Ordinance (1787), 283 ; on the obli- 
gations of contracts, 290. 

Danville, 99, 328 ; conventions at, 331 ; 
political club, 353. 

Dartmouth, Lord, 70. 

Dayton (O.), 498. 

De Grasse, def.-ated, 212. 

De Kalb, sent from France, 34 ; embarks 
for America, 151. 

De Peyster, at Mackinac, 127 ; to aid 
Hamilton, 130 ; his character, 130 ; 
anxious, 137 ; at Detroit, 142, 237 ; to 
dislodge Americans at Chicago, 203. 

Deane, Silas, in Paris, 147 ; commis- 
sioner, 1.50 ; his plan of a western 
State, 150. 

Debts, collection of, under the treaty 
(1782). impeded, 229 ; interest on them, 
230 ; date of prohibitory laws, 241. 

Delaware, accepts Articles of Confeder- 
ation, 170. 

Delawares, send messenger south. 90 ; 
friendly, 112 ; divided interests, 124 ; 
disaffected, 128; divided, 132; sus- 
pected, 139 ; peace party, 177 ; exciting 
suspicion, 192. 

Dennian, Mathias, 315. 

D'Estaing, Count, his proclamation, 138 ; 
in American waters, 158. 

Detroit, 175 ; described, 87 ; its strategic 
unportance, 112 ; naval force at, 128 ; 



INDEX. 



581 



anxiety at, 137 ; its g-arrison, 140 ; re- 
inforced, 141 ; De Peyster in com- 
mand, 142 ; garrison at, 176 ; still 
threatened, 177, 190, 198; its posses- 
sion demanded, 2;>4. 

Dickinson, John, 75 ; presents articles of 
confederation, 107. 

Dickson. Colonel. lOli. 

Dinwiddie, Governor, 8. 

Donelson, Colonel, goes to Nashville, 
179. 

Doniol, 145, 223. . 

Doolittle, Amos, 363. 

Dorchester, Lord, at Quebec, 276 ; told 
not to assist the Indians openly, 276 ; 
his western intrigues, 3()7, 373 ; and 
k>t. Clair's campaign, 425 ; his injudi- 
cious speech, 454 ; returns to England, 
483. 

Doughty, Captain, 272. 

Douglity, Major, 273. 

Douglass, Ephraim, 23(). 

Drake, Sir Francis, 104. 

Duane, James, 258. 

Duck River, 343. 

Dxur, Col. William, relations to Manas- 
si^'' • tier, 292, 311 ; his failure, 435. 

Dui.i.ip Station, 421. 

Dunmore, Lord, opposed to the Walpole 
grant, 49 ; his creature, Connolly, 52 ; 
goes west, 57 ; his western grants, 59 ; 
takes Fort Pitt, 65 ; issues a procla- 
mation (April 2(5, 1774), 66 ; Delawares 
and Shawnees aroused, 68 ; on the 
Hockhocking, 73 ; makes treaty, 74 ; 
Tory sympathies, 74 ; and Henderson's 
Transylvania, 84 ; arousing slaves and 
Indians, 85 ; driven on hoard a frigate, 
85 ; his plan to seize the northwest, 
87 ; and the western Tories, 111; pro- 
poses to settle the loyalists on the 
Mississippi, 242. 

Dunn, Map of North America, 214. 

Durrand, 173. 

Dutchman's Point, 234. 

D wight, Timothy, 531, 

Eaton's Station, 91. 

Eheling, 478. 

Education, and the Ordinance (1787), 283, 
289. 

EUicott, Andrew, 266 ; to run the bounds 
of Louisiana, 565 ; descends the Mis- 
sissippi, 5()5 ; interview with Caronde- 
let, 5()5 ; brings down his troops, '^i)^\. 

Elliot, Matthew, turns trait<)r, 128 ; raid- 
ing, 1 75 ; breaks up the Moravians at 
Gnadenbiitten, 195. 

Emigration west, 'A'^. 

England, her di'bt from the American 
war, 6 ; her misjudgment in bringing 
on the war, 144 ; effect of the Frencb 
alliance upon, 154 ; acts of conciliation 
in Parliament. 1.54 ; her navy, 1.58 ; and 
the peace (1782>, 210, 213 ; cost of the 
war, 220, 225 ; its losses, 225 ; her tem- 
l)cr suspi'cted, 22(), 227 ; her traders in 
tlie Iiockii's, 2;'>9 ; supi)lying Indians 
with powder, 275 ; her intrigues in 



Kentuckj-, 373, 565 ; war with Spain, 
564. 

English Colonies, popidation, 6 ; pro- 
sperous, (J ; combining, 7. 

Erie Triangle, 266. 

Ettweiu, Bishop, 56. 

Evans and Pownall's ilap,,39. 

Evans and Gibson's Map, 100. 

Evans, Middle Colonies, 251. 

Expediency of securing our American 
Colonies, 25. 

Fallen Timbers, battle, 459. 
Fauchet, succeeds Genet, 541. 
Federalist, The, 278. 
Fenno, Gazette of the United States, 408. 
Fergusson, defeated at King's Mountain, 

181. 
Filson, John, on Boone, 44 ; surveyor, 

315 ; killed, 316 ; in Kentucky, 331 ; 

his map, 331. 
Finlav. John, 46. 
Fish Creek, 68. 
Fitch, John, map of the northwest, 321, 

322 ; relations with Franklin, 324 ; 

ridiculed, 325 ; his steamboat, 512. 
Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond, Life ofShel- 

burne, 223. 
Florida, Indians of, 37 ; Luzerne urges 

an attack upon, 164 ; Spain's desire 

for, 184 ; restored to Spain, 222. See 

West Florida, 
Florida Blanca, Count, made minister, 

151 ; offers mediation, 154. 
Floyd, John, 61. 
Fort Adams, 456. 
Fort Armstrong, 139. 
Fort Bute at Mancbac, captured, 162. 
Fort Cliarlotte. SO. 181, 521. 
Fort Chartres, 2(;. 
Fcjrt Defiance, 45(5. 
Fort Fincastle, 72. 
Fort Finney, 272. 
Fort Gage, 26, 113. 
Fort Gower, 72. 
Fort Harmar, 293 ; view of, 293 ; site, 

299. .300. ;')03, council at, ;'.'.I8. 
Fort Henry, 72, 112, 139 ; attacked, 114, 

194, 204. 
Fort Jefferson. 174, 178, 428. 
Fort Laurens, 125, 132, 138 ; abandoned, 

139. 
Fort Lawrence, 269. 
Fort Ligonier, 139. 
Fort ^Iclntosh, built, 125 ; repaired, 

2()8 ; view, 269. 
Fort Massac, 25, .562. 
Fort Miami, 38, 455. 
Fort Moultrie, attacked, 97. 
Fort Xelsou, 194. 
Foi't Niagai-a, view, 449. 
Fort Ouiatanon, .38. 
Fort Panmure (Natchez), 162, 189. 
Fort Plaquemines, .551. 
Fort Pitt. Indians meet Croghan at, l."> ; 
Crawford in command. IK! ; critical 
situation under Brodhead, 192. 
Fort Randolph, 112, 115, 1.32 ; aban- 
doned, 139. 



582 



INDEX. 



Fort Recovery, 455. 

Fort Kosalie/llil.'. 

Fort Kutledge, !t4. 

Fort Sackville, 134. 

Fort St. Joseph, oi). 

Fort Schuyler, 251. 

Fort Staiiwix, 268 ; treaty (1768), 15, 96, 
26<S ; map of the property line, 15 ; 
site, 19. 

Fort Stephen, 521. 

Fort Tombigbee, 38. 

Fort Washington (Cincinnati), built, 316. 

Fort Wayne, 460. 

Fox, C. J., assails the treaty (1782), 209 ; 
coalition witli North, 224. 

Foxes (the Indian tribe), 113, 120. 

Fx-ance, and a greater France, 1 ; hatred 
of England, 107 ; alliance with the 
United States, 118 ; plots to lure the 
Americans to a collapse, 146 ; treaty of 
alliance with, 153 ; her navy, 158 ; to 
concur in any jieace movements, 159 ; 
treaty with Spain (1779), 160 ; not enti- 
tled to American gratitude, 165 ; abet- 
ting Spain on the Mississippi question, 
183 ; intrigues on the Mississippi, 372 ; 
her supposed desire for the Mississippi 
valley, 569 ; threatening war, 570. 

Frankfort (Ky.), site, 57, 356. 

Franklin, Benjamin, warns the English 
government, 7 ; in London, 14 ; his 
barrier colonies, 22 ; favors an Illinois 
colony, 38 ; opposes Hillsborough, 41 ; 
the Walpole Company, 47 ; on canaliz- 
ing rivers, 52 ; his answer to Hillsbor- 
ough, 55 ; disputes Virginia's western 
claims, 55 ; on western lawlessness, 5() ; 
urges repeal of the Quebec Bill, 76 ; 
the head of the Committee of Secret 
Correspondence, 145 ; sent to Europe, 
150 ; influence in Paris, 151 ; hears of 
Burgoyne's surrender, 152 ; sole com- 
missioner, 158 ; discredits the Vir- 
ginia Charter claims, 167 ; drafts Act 
of Confederation, 167 ; deceived by 
Vergennes, 184 ; his character, 208 ; 
his action on the treaty (1782), 208 ; 
distrusts loyalists, 21 7 ; could he have 
secured Canada to the United States 
at the peace (1782)'? 217; relations 
with Hartley, 222 ; fears a renewal of 
the war, 227 ; thinks the evils follow- 
ing the war unduly magnified, 228 ; 
Sendinc/ Felons to Aim rica. L':')0 ; on the 
British debts, 2;')0; and the loyalists, 
242 ; offers gratuity to Fitch, 324 ; re- 
turns from Europe, 342. 

Franklin, State of, beginnings of, 341, 

342 ; F'rankland, an alternative name, 

343 ; unrest in, ;!50 ; the collapse, 354. 
Franklin, William, governor of New 

Jersey, 7, 15 ; favors an Illinois eol- 
ony, 38. 

Fraser, Lieutenant, 28. 

French, the, their intrigue with the In- 
dians, 8 ; contrasted with the English 
in relations with the Indians, 8 ; rivals 
of the English in trade with the In- 
diansj 23. 



French Lick, 143. 

Frene:iii. National Gazette, 408. 

Frobisher, 220, 235. 

Frontier settlements, 20. 

Fulton, Robert, 6, 512 ; and the " Cler- 
mont," 325. 

Fur trade, the, in Canada suffers from 
the treaty (1782), 220 ; interfered with 
by Americans, 235 ; in London, 237.; 
on the lakes, 240 ; and the lake posts, 
416) ; in the West, 467. 

Fur traders on the Mississippi, 29. 

Gage, General, and the Canadians, 5, 
25 ; and the western fur trade, 28 ; the 
Illinois colony, 38 ; retires, 60 ; and 
the French on the Wabash, 70 ; in 
Boston, 86 ; wishing to seize New 
Orleans, 108. 

Galiano and Vald^z, 536. 

Gallatin, Albert, 451 ; his western lands, 
256 ; supj)osed complicity with Adet, 
561. 

Gallipolis, 404, 436 ; position of, 290 ; a 
"wretched abode," 498, 538. 

Galphinton, 343. 

Galvez, Bernardo de, at Natchez, 142 ; 
at New Orleans, 149 ; issues proclama- 
tion, 157 ; attacks the English posts, 
1(!2 ; extends Louisiana, 163 ; attacks 
Mobile, 181 ; takes Pensacola, 189 ; his 
portrait given to Congress, 222. 

Gardoqui, Diego de, confronts Jay on 
the Mississijjpi question, 183 ; arrives 
in Anaerica, 318 ; relations with Fitch, 
324 ; arrives in Philadelphia, 337 ; in- 
triguing at the West, 353 ; and Mir6, 
35() ; seeks to implicate Sevier, 360. 

Gates, General, defeated at Camden, 181. 

Gautier, marauding, 130. 

Gayosd. his deportment, 518; intriguing 
in Kentucky, ."i.">:i; governor of Louisi- 
ana, 567; orders evacuation of Natchez, 
573. 

Genesee country, 528 ; rights of Massa- 
chusetts in, 2(i4 ; map, 499. 

Genet, his democratic clubs, 453 ; arrives 
in America, 532 ; would induce a war 
with England and Spain, 538 ; deposed, 
541. 

George, Lieutenant, 157. 

Georgia, Indian cessions in, 9 ; disputes 
with the federal government, 376; 
map, 377. 

Georgia company, 377. 

Gerard, at Philadelphia, 155 ; to prepare 
Congress to yield to Spanish wishes, 
155 ; urges on Congress the propriety 
of the vSpanish demands, 159. 

Germain, instructs Hamilton to make 
raids. Ill ; favors marauding parties, 
126 ; his plan for a campaign on the 
Mississippi, 142 ; his plan to maintain 
line of communications between Can- 
ada and Florida, 171. 

Germans, in Kentiicky, 529. 

Gerry. Elbridge, 269. 

Gibault, 120. 

Gibraltar, to be acquired by Spain, 159. 



INDEX. 



583 



Gibson, Captain George, 147. 

Gibson, Colonel John, 124 ; at Fort Lau- 
rens, 125, 138 ; goes West with his regi- 
ment, 1!)1 ; succeeds Brodliead at Fort 
Pitt, 195. 

Girty, George, 194. 

Girty, Simon, 72, So, 271 ; suspected, 114 ; 
turns traitor, 128 ; leading Indians, 

- 138 ; among the Wyandots, 192 ; his 
temper at the close of the war, 237 ; 
and Harniar's campaign, 421 ; at the 
Miami Council, 443,450; after Wayne's 
victory, 460; leaves Detroit, 483. 

Girtys, the, raiding, 175. 

Gnadenhiitten, broken up, 195. 

Gooch, governor of Virginia, 16G. 

Gordon, Captain Harry, 25. 

Gordon, Colonel George, on the Ohio 
country, i:! ; at Fort Pitt, 149. 

Gordon, Dr. William, 464. 

Gordon, Kev. William, 72. 

Grafton. Duke of, 11. 

Grand Portage, 220, 239. 

GrantJiam, Lord, at Madrid, 160. 

Gratiot, Charles, 130, 171. 

Grayson, 2(jl, 262 ; on the Mississippi 
question, .319. 

Greenbrier River, 11. 

Green River, 49. 

Greene, Nathanael, in the South, 181, 
1.S8. 

Greenville camp, 452. 

Grenville, Lord, on the retention of Can- 
ada, 217 ; and Jay, 464, 476. 

Grimaldi, recommends grant of money to 
the Americans, 147 ; retires, 151. 

Guadaloupe, 4. 

Guthrie, Geography, 468. 

Haeeta, 238. 

Haldimand, General, urges settlements 
in the Mississippi, 28 ; in Pensacola. 
31; views, 40 ; succeeds Gage, 60 ; dis- 
turbed by Dunmore's acts, (i5 ; and the 
French on the Wabash, 70 ; watching 
New Oileans. 108 ; does not approve 
Hamilton's advance onVincennes, 126; 
relieved in marauding, 128 ; his anxie- 
ties, 138 ; reinforces Detroit, 141 ; in- 
structed to attack New Orleans, 161 ; 
canalizes the St. Lawrence, 170 ; to 
aid Sinclair's movements, 171 ; iirging 
raids, 19.3; inactive (1782), 203; en- 
deavors to make good the Qnebec Bill, 
216; refuses to surrender posts, 2.35; 
rebuked by his government, 241 ; fears 
an Indian war, 245 ; and the disaf- 
fected Iroquois, 271. 

Hall, Colonel, sent to demand the posts. 
23.5 

Hail. .James, Sketches, 83. 

Hall. Lieutenant, 70. 

Hamilton, Alexander, on western lands 
as a source of revenue, 187 ; fearful of 
the dangers after the peace (1782), 228 ; 
Obsert'ations on Jai/s Treat;/, 229 ; on 
the carrying off of slaves by the Brit- 
ish. 2.'il ; on the western Indians, 243; 
supposed to favor monarchy, 277 ; on 



a moneyed aristocracy, 290 ; and the 
western lands, 407, 504; his opposi- 
tion to Jeif erson, 408 ; advocates the 
Jay treaty, 478. 
Hamilton, Colonel Henry, at Detroit, 87 ; 
intriguing with the Indians, 90, 111; 
organizing raids. 111 ; his proclama- 
tion, 112; his plans (1777), 112; con- 
trols the Ohio valley, 112 ; would or- 
ganize chasseurs at Vincennes, 112 ; 
would attack New Orleans, 113; at- 
tacks Vincennes, 126 ; his employment 
of Indians, 127 ; in charge of the war 
on the upper lakes, 127 ; at Detroit, 
127 ; suspicious, 128 ; sends parties to 
the Ohio, 128 ; hears of Clark's suc- 
cess, 129 ; sends messenger to Stuart, 
129, 131 ; his large plans, 129 ; calls on 
De Peyster for aid, 130 ; takes Vin- 
cennes, 131 ; warns the Spanish com- 
mander at St. Louis, 131 ; his plans, 

133 ; captured and sent to Virginia, 
135 ; his official report, 135 ; on parole, 
135. 

Hamtramck, at Fort Harmar, 296 ; on 
the ^A'abash, 419, 441 ; occupies Fort 
Miami, 483. 

Hand, General, at Pittsburg, 112: on 
the defensive, 114, 115; at Fort Pitt, 
117 ; his " squaw campaign," 128. 

Hardlabor (S. C), 10. 

Harmar, General, in command, 270 ; at 
Vincennes. 29() ; his campaign, 418. 

Ilarpci', Hoix^rt E., .570. 

Harrison, Benjamin, governor of Vir- 
ginia, 251. 

Harrison, Reuben, 156. 

Harrison, William Henry, with Wayne, 
457 ; secretary of the Northwest Ter- 
ritory, 573. 

Harrod, James, 44, 331 ; lays out a town, 
61 ; at Harrodsburg, 81, 82. 

Harrodsburg, 328 ; attacked, 11 1 ; con- 
vention, 116. 

Hart, Rev. John, .529. 

Hartley, relations with Franklin, 222. 
228. 

Hay, Major, 131. 

Heckewelder, 441 ; would restrain the 
Indians, 128 ; his maps. 2.55, 507. 

Helm, Leonard, sent to Vincennes, 120 ; 
surrendei's, 1.31 ; released by Clark, 

134 ; left in command at Vincennes, 
1.35. 

Henderson, Colonel Richard, and his 
colony, 81 ; at Boonesborough, !S3 ; his ^ 
character, 84 ; opens land office, 97. 

Henry, Alexander, 24. .389. 

Henry, Patrick, and western lands, 61 ; 
governor of Virginia, 114; seeks to 
open trade with New Orleans, 1.55 ; 
favors retaliation for the deportation 
of the blacks, 232 ; urging amalgama- 
tion of races, 236 ; on the loyalists, 24.3 ; 
on Virginia water-ways, 24S ; and the 
western i-outes, 257 ; and western 
land grabbers, 270 ; on the Mississippi 
question, 3i;i; and Fitch's steamboat, 
324 ; his confidence in the confedera- 



584 



INDEX. 



tion, r;,~)l ; disi^isted with Jay's Mis- 
sissippi project, o">4 ; bis despondency. 
;;S(i ; refuses mission to Madrid, 548. 

Henry, William, o21. 

HiUsborough, Lord, first colonial secre- 
tary, 41 ; opposes the Walpole grant, 
47 ; resigns, 57. 

Hockliocking River, valley, 29;5. 

Holland Land Company, 204. 

Holston settlement, 112 ; treaty, 375. 

Hopewell, treaty of, ■■>4.'>, 344. 

Hoiunas (La.), l()i). 

Houston, Samuel, and the Franklin con- 
stitution, 343. 

Howe, General Robert, 272. 

Hudson River, in a route to the West, 
248 ; canal to the lakes, .")()(). 

Hudson's Bay, fur trade, 24. 

Huntmgton, Countess of, 270. 

Huntington, General Jedediah, 236, 244. 

Hutchins, Colonel Anthony, seized by 
Willing, l.j(i, 11)2, 189 ; in Blount's plot, 
.5(58. 

Hutchins, Lieutenant, 70. 

Hutchins, Thomas, Description of Vir- 
ginia, 1.3 ; his map, 13 ; French trans- 
lation, 17 ; mai> of the American 
Bottom, 27 ; TopotjraphicaJ Descrip- 
tion, 251 ; Geographer of the United 
f^tates, 260 ; dies, 267 ; and the Ohio 
Company, 282, 322 ; Fitch's map dedi- 
cated to him, 323. 

Hutchinson, Thomas, 264. 

Iberville River, 32 ; route from the Mis- 
Kissi])pi, 108. 

Illinois ('onipany, 200, .304. 

Illinois country, and the fur trade, 25 ; 
its tribes, 2(J ; projected colony, 38 ; 
map, ;/9 ; favored by iShelburne, 40 ; 
colony opposed by the Board of Trade, 
41 ; Clark's spies in, 1] 7 ; conquered by 
the Americans, 120 ; made a county of 
Virginia, 122 ; the French inhabitants, 
.562. 

Illinois Land Company, 69. 

Illinois River, 39. 

Inday, George, Topographical Descrip- 
tion, map, 248, 249. 

Indiana (colony), map of, 17 ; included in 
the Ohio Company grant, 47. 

Indiaua grant, 109 ; revived, 90 ; its char- 
acter, 106 ; interest of Tom Paine in, 
187; sustained, 200. 

Indians, trade with, 7, 23, 25, 546 ; trou- 
bles with whites, 7 ; adverse interests, 
8 ; French and English treatment of, 
8 ; armed by tradets, 21 ; in the Revo- 
lution, employed by both sides, 87 ; 
priority of use, 87, 126; number of 
warriors e:ist of the Mississippi, 88; 
charaettaized in the Declaration of In- 
dependence, 91 ; as fighters, 175 ; ca- 
pricious, 195 ; to occupy a neutral ter- 
ritory between the United States and 
Spain, 212; irritated by the treaty 
(1782), 229,235; ravaging (1783), 2.36"; 
informed of the terms of the peace 
(1782), 237 ; their wars following the 



peace (1782), _ 237 ; losses of life and 
pro])erty inflicted by, 243 ; fear en- 
croachments, 245 ; their land title, 
only extinguished by government, 268 ; 
insist on the Ohio line, 268 ; in council 
at Niagara, 274 ; cost of subduing 
them, 776 ; number of warriors, 302 ; 
responsibility of the English for their 
hostihty, 308 ; diverse policies of Con- 
gress and the States, .308 ; numbers in 
the South, ;'.82, 54(). 

limes, Henry, 362 ; in league with Sebas- 
tian, 55(5. 

Innes, Judge, 243. 

Irish, in the West, 84 ; in Kentucky, 529. 

Iron Banks, 174. 

Iron Mountain, 77. 

Iroquois, and Cherokees, 9 ; favor the 
English, 14 ; map of their country, 15; 
their numbers, 16 ; their allies, 16 ; 
rival pretensions to Kentucky, K!, 20, 
78 ; Guy Johnson's map of their coun- 
try, 18, 19 ; encouraged by the French, 
72 ; incensed at the treaty (1782), 217, 
229 ; lands sold (1784), 208. 

Irvine, General William, 250 ; at Fort 
Pitt, 196 ; on the western Indians, 243. 

Jack, Colonel, 92. 

Jackson, Andrew, his wife, 179 ; goes to 
Tennessee, 360 ; in Congress, 544 ; in 
the Tennessee Convention, 559. 

Jackson, General James, and the Yazoo 
frauds, 550 ; killed, 500. 

tiacobin clubs, 532. 

James River and Potomac Canal Com- 
pany, 254 ; Washington its President, 
257. 

James River route to the West, 252, 
254. 

Jay, John, on the Quebec Bill, 75 ; sent 
to Spain, 164 ; in Madrid, 182 ; worried, 
201 ; delivers his instructions, 201 ; re- 
bukes the supineness of Congress, 202 ; 
his influence on the treaty (1782), 208 ; 
estimate of Vergennes, 223 ; apprehen- 
sive of the future, 226 ; charges the 
first infractions of the treaty (1782) on 
the Americans, 229 ; on Indian affairs, 
272 ; on the monarchical fever, 278 ; on 
the Mississippi question, 318 ; hopeless, 
320; treats with Gardoqui, 338 ; aided 
by a committee, 347 ; chief justice, 
415 ; named as envoy to England, 463 ; 
his instructions, 464 ; makes treaty, 
4(i6 ; passions aroused in America by 
the treaty, 477, 478 ; treaty ratified, 
480. 

Jefferson, Thomas, would drive the In- 
dians beyond the Mississippi, 9.3 ; and 
the Transylvania Colony, 97 ; would 
attack Detroit. 190; ceases to be gov- 
ernor of Mrginia, 193 ; Notes on Vir- 
ginia, 214 ; an infraction of the treaty 
(1782), 228 ; encourages Ledyard, 239 ; • 
planning western States, 244 ; on the 
bounds of Kentucky, 246 ; on the Po- 
tf)miic as a water-way, 248 ; on States 
at the West, 257 ; his ordinance (1784), 



INDEX. 



585 



258 ; its names of States, 258 ; plan for 
a survey of the western territory, 2G1 ; 
favors small States, 'J()2 ; rectang-ular 
survey, 2(iG ; on the monarchical idea, 
278 ; on Shays 's Rebellion, 278 ; favors 
rehgious freedom, 288 ; on the Missis- 
sippi question, ^11' ; his bounds of new 
States as set forth in the Ordinance 
of 1784, ;>22 ; his views of the West, 
351 ; his o])position to Hamilton, 408 ; 
on the St. Clair campaign, 422 ; negoti- 
ations with Hammond, 431, 437, 441, 
441) ; on tlie Presqu'Isle question, 43(5 ; 
and Ebeling-, 478 ; argues the right of 
the United States to the Mississippi, 
530 ; at variance with Hamilton, 530 ; 
resigns from the President's cabinet, 
540. 

Johnson, Guy, his maj) of the property 
line, 15 ; at Fort Stanwix, 15 ; map of 
Iroquois country, 18, li) ; at Niagara, 
177 ; would attack Fort Pitt, 203. 

Johnson, Sir John, on tlie treaty (1782), 
217 ; his later conduct, 237 ; and the 
western Indians, 245 ; in council at 
Niagara, 273 ; told by Lord Dorchester 
to quiet the Indians, 27(). 

Johnson, Sir William, and the Indians, 
8 ; sends Croghan to England, 8 ; and 
the property line, 14 ; at Fort Stanwix 
(17()8), 15 ; on tlie Illinois country, 28; 
Dunmore's war, 68, 72 ; his home, 
501. 

Johnston, Governor, 16!) ; at Pensacola, 
32. 

Jones, Joseph, 185, 231. 

Jones, Judge, Tory. 127, 242. 

Jonesborough (Teiin.), 334 ; convention, 
335. 

Juau de la Fuca, Straits of, 238. 

Juniata River, as a route to the West, 
250. 

Kalm, 4. 

Kanawha River, Indian boundary, 10, 
14 ; its mouth the site of a proposed 
capital, 58 ; navigableness, 252. 

K:iskaskia, 25 ; captured, 119. 

Kelley, Walter, 66. 

Kennedy, Patrick, 70. 

Kenton, Simon, (Jl, 72. 

Kentucky, destitute of Indians, 1() ; given 
over to occupation by the Fort Stanwix 
treaty, 17; events (17()7-1774), 4:> ; 
country described. 58, !I9, :523 ; relieved 
bj' the victory at Point Pleasant, 81 ; 
set up as a county of Virginia, 08, ll(i ; 
population, 111, 178, 320, 331, 3<)<), 526; 
raided. 111 ; disturbed condition, 116 ; 
great immigration, 13(i, 170, 178, 270, 
304, 328, 372, 52() ; new roads opened, 
13(> ; Bird's raid, 175 ; salt springs, 178 ; 
counties, 178, 328 ; conditions of life, 
179 ; seeking Statehood, 245 ; Imlay's 
map, 249 ; scrambles for land, 2(51 ; 
sends force across the Oliio, 275 ; law- 
less attacks on the Indians, ;>()5, 30<); 
Spanish intrigues, 309 ; the movement 
for autonomy, ;530 ; Filson's map, 332 ; 



movenients toward separation from 
Virginia, 340 ; delays, 355, 357 ; com- 
mittee on making a State, 3()1 ; British 
intrigue in, ;>94, 542 ; antipathy to In- 
dians, 421 ; volunteei'S under Wayne, 
451; admitted to the Union, 515; 
framing a constitution, 523 ; map, 524, 
525 ; Barker's map, 527 ; Toulmin's 
map, 528; her soil, 528 ; sympathy with 
the French faction, 540 ; Caroudelet's 
intrigues, 550, 553, 557 ; intrigues of 
French agents, 5(J2. 

Kentucky Gazette, 357, 542. 

Kentucky River, 99. 

Kickapoos, 26. 113 ; attacked, 422. 

King, Rufns, and the ordinance (1784), 
2(il ; and the Phelps and Gorliam pur- 
chase, 2()4 ; and the rectangular sur- 
veys, 267 ; on the Kentuckians, 274 ; 
on the cost of the Indian war, 276 ; on 
tlie ordinance (1787j, 284, 285 ; on the 
Mississippi question, 318 ; opposes the 
admission of Tennessee, 559 ; in Lon- 
don, 571. 

Kingsford, Dr. William, the Canadian 
historian, 71. 

King's Mountain, fight, 178, 181. 

Kirkland, missionary to the Indians, 87; 
and Brant, 434. 

Kitchiii, T., map of Pennsylvania, 54, 
55 ; maps, 106. 

Kittanning, 15, 18, 139 ; abandoned, 
114. 

Knox, General, demands the posts, 235 ; 
and Harmar's campaign, 418 ; plans a 
legionary system for the army, 434. 

Knoxville, started, 358 ; founded, 518. 

KnoxviUe Gazette, 518. 

La Balme, Colonel, to surprise Detroit, 
177. 

La Freni^i-e, 37. 

La Rochefoucanlt - Liancourt, Travels, 
508, 511. 

Lafayette, his letter to the Canadians, 
138 ; embarks for America, 151 ; would 
invade Canada, 159 ; goes back to 
France, 159 ; and the Mississippi ques- 
tion, 257, 319 ; on the Spanish question, 
337. 

Lafont, 120. 

Lake Athabaska, 390. 

Lake Chautauqua portage, 25(i. 

Lake ^lieliigan, map, 49. 

Lake Xcpigon. 220. 

Lake Nipissing, 160, 218. 

Lake of the Woods, 214-216, 221. 

Lake Otsego, 251. 

Lake Pontcliartrain, 109. 

Lake Superior, trade, 24, 235 ; filled with 
islands. :i9, 1(H). 221 ; Carver at, 104 ; 
maps. 221 ; vessels on, 240. 

Lake Winnipeg. 24. 104. 

Lake AVinnipiseogee, 263. 

Lancaster, treaty of, 166. 

Lands, Indian titles, 268, 

Lane, Isaac, 269. 

Langlade, at St. Joseph, 130 ; to attack 
Kaskaskia, 173 ; retreats, 174. 



58G 



INDEX. 



Lansdowne, Lord, 277. 

Le Kouge, Carte de PAinfrique, 501. 

Ledyard, John, his career, 238. 

Lee, Arthur, 210, 208, 2(j9 ^ in London, 
145 ; commissioner in Europe, 150 ; 
meets Grimaldi, 151. 

Lee, General Charles, at Charleston, 92. 

Lee, Henry, of Virginia, 439 ; on the 
Mississippi question, 319. 

Lee, Richard Henry, 210, 227, 229, 232 ; 
on the western country, 182 ; on the 
ohligations of contract, 290 ; expects 
western lands to sink the national 
debt, 296. 

Lee, William, 153, 237 ; in London, 75. 

Leech, John, 127. 

Legge, Major, 60. 

Lernoult, 128 ; at Detroit, 137. 

Lexington (Ky.), named on hearing of the 
fight at Lexington, Mass., 85. 

Lexington (Mass.), fight, 62. 

Lewis, Andrew, 53 ; in the Dunmore 
war, 72 ; fight at Point Pleasant, 73. 

Lewis, Samuel, map of the United 
States, 380, 381; Map of New York 
State, 474, 475. 

Licking River, 99, 315. 

Liebert, Philip, 273. 

Limestone (now Maysville) (Ky.), 99, 
315, 328, 510. 

Lincoln, General Benjamin, secretary of 
war, 237 ; and the tendency to mon- 
archy, 278 ; to treat with the Indians, 
447. 

Liuctot, Godefroy, 142. 

Linn, Lieutenant, 147 ; ascends the Mis- 
sissippi with powder, 148. 

Liston, British minister, 570. 

Little Turtle, 420, 430, 456, 488. 

Livingston, rebukes the peace commis- 
sioners. 210. 

Lochry (Loughrey), Colonel Archibald, 
194, 19(;. 

Logan, Colonel Benjamin, 82 ; raiding 
with Clark, 176 ; and his militia, 331 ; 
raids upon the Wabash, 345. 

Logan, John, the Indian, and the Dun- 
more war, 68 ; his famous speech, 74 ; 
raiding, 175. 

Logan's Fort, attacked. 111. 

Long, Voi/ac/es and Travels, 416. 

Long Island, battle, 147. 

Long Lake, 220. 

Loring, .Jonathan Austin, 152. 

Losantiville, 315. 

Loskiel, United Brethren, 422. 

Louis XV. (France), dies, 144. 

Louis XVI. (France), accedes, 144 ; 
agrees to recognize American inde- 
pendence, 153, .531. 

Louisiana, anxiety of the English to 
conquer it, 33 ; change of masters un- 
der the secret treaty (17()3), 33 ; under 
Spanish rule, 106 ; population, 371 ; 
its condition, 551 ; English project to 
seize it, 564 ; threatened on all sides, 
570. 

Louisville, 258, 317 ; laid out, 59 ; lands 
bought up, 100. 



Loyalists, England hopes to settle them 
in the Ohio country, 217, 218 ; Franls- 
lin's distrust of them, 217 ; in the 
treaty (1782), 232, 242 ; confiscations, 
233 • American dislike of them, 233 ; 
recommendation of Congress, 234 ; 
their cause connected with the deten- 
tion of the posts, 241 ; hastening to 
Ontario, 241'; exodus from the States, 
242 ; Canadian homes planned for 
them, 242 ; at Cataraqui, 242 ; their 
numbers in Canada, 242 ; United Em- 
pire Loyalists, 243. 

Ludlow, Thomas, in the Miami country, 
315. 

Luz^i'ne, reaches Boston, 1(54 ; seeks 
Washington, l(i4 ; delighted at Ameri- 
can degradation, 200 ; on the treaty 
(1782), 216. 

Lyman, General Phineas, and settle- 
ments along the Mississippi, 28, 42 ; in 
West Florida, 110. 

Lyttleton, Lord, 70. 

Mackenzie, Alexander, western explo- 
rations, 536. 

Mackenzie River, 239. 

Mackinac post, 130 ; its trade, 130 ; anx- 
ieties at, 137, 142 ; De Peyster relieved 
by Sinclair, 142 ; as centre of fur trade, 
220, 235. 

Madison, James, draws up the case of 
the United States for Spain, 184 ; on 
Virginia's land claims, 207 ; would set 
up Kentucky as a State, 2t)7 ; on west- 
ern routes, 251 ; on the Mississippi 
question, 256. 

Madrid, Pinckney negotiating a treaty 
at, 554. 

Mahoning River, 56. 

Manchac, 15(), 157 ; captured, 1(!2. 

Manchester (O.), 422. 

Mandans, 468. 

Marietta, position of. 291, 293, 297, 300, 
301, 303 ; the surrounding country, 299 ; 
founded, 299 ; its community, 302 ; 
view, 305 ; origin of name, 305 ; Cam- 
pus Martins, 307. 

Marshall, Chief Justice, on western land 
titles, 60. 

Marshall, Colonel Thomas, approached 
by Lord Dorchester, .'168. 

Marshall, Humiihrey, opposes Wilkin- 
son, 349. 

Martin, Joseph, at Powell's Valley, 21. 

Martin's Station, 21, 82. 

Maryland, and the sea-to-sea charters, 
98 ; objects to paying Virginia for 
bounty lands, 168 ; and would set 
western limits to seaboard States, 168; 
joins the confederation, 199. 

Mason, George, on Virginia's western 
claims, 55 ; and the Transylvania 
Companj', 98 ; sympathy for Ken- 
tucky, 116 ; and the Indiana grant, 
166 ; on the Virginia cession, 185 ; on 
jeopardizing the peace (1782), 232 ; on 
the Virginia charter, 245 ; on the 
western States, 285 ; charai)ion of reli- 



INDEX. 



b^l 



gion and education, 280 ; on the Mis- 
sissippi question, ol9 ;■ susi)icious of 
the North, 351. 

Massachusetts, lier sea-to-sea charter, 
2()3 ; boundary dispute with New- 
Hampshire, 2(j.'> ; with New York, 
2(54 ; her western lands, 2(>5 ; cedes 
them, 2(m ; ^Sllays's Rebellion, 278. 

Massie, Nathaniel, 421. 

Mauniee River, 3!) ; rapids of the, 455. 

Maurepas, 144, 14(j, 154. 

Mayflower, barge, 298, 299. _ 

Maysville (Ky.), V)9. iSee Limestone. 

McAfee brothers, 57 ; at Harrodsburg, 
81 ; on Salt River, 82. 

McDonald, Major Angus, in the Dunmore 
war, 72. 

McGillivray, Alexander, his plots, 329 ; 
his trading profits, 34(1 ; and the Span- 
ish aims, ■352 ; attacks the Cumberland 
settlements, 359 ; relations with Miro, 
371, 379 ; his treaty with Knox, 380, 
385 ; his home, 38.3 ; as a leader, 384 ; 
in New York, 385; visited by John 
Pope, 519 ; dies, 520. 

McIIenry, Secretary of War, 482. 

Mcintosh, General Lachlan, succeeds 
General Hand, 12.3 ; hopes to attack 
Detroit, 124; builds Fort Mcintosh. 
125 ; builds Fort Laurens, 125 ; relieved 
of command, 139. 

McKee, Alexander, 271 ; suspected, 114 ; 
turns traitor, 128 ; leading Shawnees, 
175 ; raiding, 194; in the Harmar cam- 
paign, 420. 

McLean, General, 237. 

McMurray, William, 322. 

Meigs, R. J., 302. 

Mercer, Colonel George, 47. 

Miami country, .315. 

Miamis, Ki ; in council, 442. 

Michaux, Andr^, a tool of Genet, .5.33, 
5.37 ; sent west, 5.33 ; his revolutionary 
plans countenanced by Jefferson, 537 ; 
his journal, 537. 

Michii;an, i>lan to turn over its peninsula 
to iMiiil^nid, 494. 

jSlitHin, (4()vernor, and the whiskey ri- 
ots, 48G. 

Milhet, a New Orleans mereliant, 34, .35. 

JMilwaukee, founded, 240. 

Mingo town, 1.3. 

Mingoes, hostile, 124, 138 ; on the Scioto, 
302. 

Ministerial line, 11. 

Minnesota River 104. 

Mi(|R('lon, 1. 

Mi rales, in Philadelphia, 184. 

Miro, at New Orleans, 329, .">4() ; his plots 
3.52 ; with Wilkinson, 3()1 ; jealous of 
Gardoqui, 3(>(i ; depending on McCJilli- 
vray, ;i71 ; leaves New Orleans, .520. 

Mississippi (\jmpany, .377 ; formed, 4(>. 

Mississip])i River, .348 ; bounding the 
English Colonies, 2 ; forks, 25 ; its fui' 
traders, 29 ; its commerce to be di- 
verted through the Iberville, 32 ; 
English troops withdi-awn, 3.3 ; Siianish 
posts, 35 ; French traders on eastern 



bank, .3() ; the French from Vineennes 
trade on it, 70 ; its source, 101, 214, 
221 ; its upper valley, 102 ; supplies for 
Americans carried up, 1 13 ; the Eng- 
lish aiming to control it, l(i2 ; free 
navigation of, 182 ; insisted on by Jay, 
183 ; map of, 214 ; right to navigate, 
215; as a channel of trade, 248, 31(), 
317 ; its opening a burning question, 
256, 263 ; CruveccEur's map, 259 ; pro- 
ject for surrendering it to Spain, 318 ; 
beginnings of steam navigation, 321 ; 
Jay's wish to yield it to Spain for 
twenty-live years, 339 ; the weak side 
of Louisi.ana, 371 ; as a boimdary, 471 ; 
the Spanish claim still a perplexity, 
516. 

Mississippi Territorj', 573. 

Missouri River, 468 ; traders, 30. 

Mitchell's map (1755), used in the treaty 
(17S2), 221 ; used in the ordinance 
(17S7), 286. 

Mobile, attacked (1780), ISl ; Indian 
conferences at, 330 ; population, 34(5 ; 
trade of, 380. 

Mohawk River, 19 ; as a route to the 
west, 248. 

Mohawk valley, 264. 

Monongahela River, ,50, 2.50, 511; map, 17. 

Monroe, James, urges the setting up of 
a western State, 247 ; in the west, 262 ; 
with the Indian commissioners, 272 ; 
on a committee for an ordinance of the 
northwest, 2S1 ; Montgomery, Lieu- 
tenant, 174. 

Montour, 91. 

Moravians in Pennsylvania, 56 ; proving 
spies, 195 ; settlements, map of, 422, 
423. 

Morey, Samuel, .512. 

Morgan, Indian agent, 90 ; commanding 
at Fort Pitt, 111. 

Morgan, Colonel George, seeking set- 
tlers, ;509 ; and western colonization, 
36(5 ; connection with New Madi-id, 
366. 

Morris brothers, 66. 

Morris, Robert, patron of Ledyard, 238 ; 
the Genesee purchase, 264 ; and New 
York hinds, 425, 474, 4tK) ; lands in 
Ohio, 500. 

Morris, (iouverneur, 1.58, 1.59 ; on what 
to yield to Spain and France, 201 ; on 
the western States. 2.S5 ; and a com- 
mercial treaty witli Kngland, 3il(i. 

Mor.se, Jedediali, Aiiicricati Gcoyrap/ii/, 
3()3, 393,491, 512; Atmrican Gazetteer, 
377 ; on Marietta, 498. 

" Mound-builders," 323 ; on the Mu.skin- 
gum, 299 ; remains, 303. 

Munseys (an Indian tribe), 140. 

Murray, General James, governor at 
Quebec, 5. 

Murray, William, 69. 

Muskingum River, maji, 17 ; its valley, 
255, 293. 

Nashville, .334, .3.59; site of, 44, 123; 
town founded by Robertson, 143 ; first 



588 



INDEX. 



named Nasliborough, 179 ; its condi- 
tion, 411. 

Natchez (Indians), 32. 

Natcliez (town), sought by fugitives from 
the East, 89; British settlers, 110; 
Tory settlers, 15() ; controlled by the 
English, 157 ; captui-ed by (4alvez, 171; 
tlie settlers rise on the Spanish garri- 
son, bS9 ; population, o-KJ ; fortified, 
360; described, 518; after the treaty 
of San Lorenzo, 5()5. 

Navarro, 352, 3(jl. 

Neville, Captain John, 90. 

New England, shipbuilding, 7. 

New Jersey, accepts Articles of Confed- 
eration, 170. 

New Jersey Company, .3()1. 

New Madrid, 309,518; map, 363 ; forti- 
fied, 366 ; Miro's apprehensions, 371. 

New Orleans, 346 ; described, 59 ; Aubry 
and Ulloa, 35 ; rising against the Span- 
iards, 36 ; O'Reilly comes, 37 ; Pollock 
in, 108 ; coveted hy the English, 108 ; 
map of vicinity, 109 ; Hamilton's plan 
to attack, 113 ; fij-e in, 361 ; open to 
attack, 371 ; trade, 519 ; defenses in- 
creased, 531 ; defenses suited for intes- 
tine troubles only, 550, 551 ; made port 
of deposit, 555. 

New York, bounds, 4 ; and the Quebec 
Bill, (!5 ; cedes her western lands, 185, 
199 ; her land cession accepted, 205, 
207 ; unhospitable to immigrants, 528. 

Newburgh (N. Y.l, 244. 

Niagara, importance of, 112 ; its surren- 
der to the Americans a trial to Hal- 
dimand, 216 ; conditions (1783), 237 ; 
Indian councils at, 271, 273 ; the falls 
in Fitch's map, 323 ; road to, 475, 499. 

Nicholas, George, 3()2 ; and the Consti- 
tution of Kentucky, 526 ; and the 
French faction, 538. 

Nickajack expedition, 547. 

Noailles, in London, 1.54. 

Nollichucky River, 79. 

Nootka Sound, 2:)S ; Spain and England 
at, 392 ; convention of, 397. 

North, Lord, 152, 154. 

North Bend (0.), 498. 

North Carolina moves her bounds west- 
ward, 327; her western settlements, 
328, 334 ; her cessions, 335 ; the act re- 
pealed, 33(i ; joins the Union, 375 ; final 
cession of her western lands, 375. 

North West Company, 220, 23.9, 389; 
unites with rivals, 239. 

Northwest coast fur trade, 389 ; rival 
claimants, 392. 

Northwestern territory, created, 306 ; its 
govermnent, JMi ; map by Morse, 364 ; 
its population and (diaracter, 400, 498 ; 
its forts, 417. See Ordinance of 1787. 

0' Fallon, Dr. James, 378; of the French 
f;iction, 5.31. 

O'Reilly, in New Orleans, 37. 

Oconee war, 330. 

Ohio, the State of. map by Rufus Put- 
nam, 495^97. 



Ohio Company of Virginia, 8 ; claims the 
Indiana lands, IS. 

Ohio Company (Walpole's), 47, 60 ; en- 
gulfs the old Ohio Company, 50 ; 
bounds extended and territory called 
Vandalia, 57. 

Ohio Company of Massachusetts, formed, 
280 ; reticent on the slavery question, 
289 ; buys land, 290 ; extent of pur- 
chase, 290, 292 ; map of it, 291 ; deter- 
mines to settle on the Muskingum, 
298 ; habits of settlement, 302 ; its 
reputation compromised, 310 ; Bai^ 
low's map, 311 ; and the Gallipolis 
scheme, 406 ; and Duer's failure, 436. 

Ohio country, Moravians in, 56 ; popu- 
lation increasing, 60 ; as a part of 
Canada, 69 ; wanted for the loyalists, 
217; the Seven Ranges, 267, 311, 313; 
unauthorized settlements, 270. 

Ohio River, current, 13; maps, 17,119, 
29(), 297, 332 ; cost of transportation 
from it to the coast, 48 ; settlements at 
the falls, 118; emigrants' boats, 175; 
bustle at the falls, 204 ; flatboats on, 
298 ; its course, 317 ; Filson's map, 332 ; 
navigation of, 413 ; Indian forays, 417 ; 
traffic on, 508 ; mail service, 510. 

Ohio valley, richness of, 12. 

Ordinance of 1784, 258 ; amended to pre- 
serve slavery, 260 ; embodies a com- 
pact with the old States, 260 ; King's 
motion, 261. 

Ordinance of 1785, 261. 

Ordinance of 1787, reported, 281 ; amend- 
ed, 283 ; passed, 283 ; credit of it, 
where due ? 284^; its influence, 284 ; its 
character, 285 ; sources of its pro- 
visions, 285 ; extent of territory cov- 
ered, 28(i ; as a compact, 2S6 ; its 
boundaries based on Mitchell's map, 

286 ; the compact futile, 28() ; creation 
of States under, 287 ; denies manhood 
suif rage, 2S7 ; its treatment of .slavery, 

287 ; of religion and education, 289 ; in 
effect, 290. 

Oregon River, 104. 

Oriskany, 112. 

Orr, Colonel, .5(i8. 

Orr, Major, attacks the Cherokees, 547. 

Oswald, the English agent, 213 ; on the 

bounds of the treaty (1782), 218. 
Oswego, 216. 
Otis, James, 4. 
Ottawa River route, 137. 
Ottawas, 113 ; their confederacy, 16 ; to 

avenge Pontiac's death, 26 ; hostile, 

124. 
Owegy, 20. 

Pacific Ocean, route to, 238. 

Page, governor of Virginia, 93. 

Pag^s, French traveler, 22, 29. 

Paine, Thomas, 85; Public Good, 186, 
246 ; his biographer, Conway, 187 ; on 
the British debts, 230 ; and the aboli- 
tion of slavery, 289 ; Ric/hts of Man, 
409 ; in Pai-is, 465 ; in the French Con- 
vention, 548. 



INDEX. 



589 



Palatines, 61. 

Panhandle region, 1S5. 

Panton, William, 519. 

Parsons, Samuel H., Indian commis- 
sioner, 269, 272 ; his character, 2X1 ; 
applies for land on behalf of the Ohio 
Company, 282 ; approached by British 
agents, 304 ; at Slarietta, 307 ; opens 
communication with the British, 367. 

Peace River, 23S. 

Pearl Kiver, 1!S1. 

Pendleton, Edmund, 547. 

Penn, Lady Juliana, 233. 

Pennsylvania, a j)i'oprietary government, 
6 ; German population, 12 ; Quakers, 
12 ; active people, 12 ; dispute with 
Connecticut, 22, 264 ; route through to 
the West. 52 ; becoming prominent, 
52 ; boundary disputes with Virginia, 
52, 6() ; impracticable western bounds 
in her charter, 53 ; Scull's map, 53 ; 
map by T. Kitchin, 54 ; the Quebec 
Bill, i\7) ; her line revolt, 188 ; commer- 
cial spirit, 250; canalization in, 254; 
western line run, 2()() ; pi'ice of land, 
298 ; her enterjjrise in opening her 
unsettled country, 528. 

Pennsylvania Gazette^ 91. 

Pensaeola, 30 ; Bouquet in command, 
30 ; Johnston there, 32 ; Haldimand 
arrives, 32 ; Congress ready to assist 
Spain in its capture, 151 ; wanted by 
Spain, 155 ; coveted by Pollock, 158 ; 
reinforced, 160 ; Indian conference at, 
330 ; trade, 34(i, 519. 

Perdido River, 181. 

Phelps and Gorham purchase, 2(j4. 

Phelps, Oliver, 500. 

Philadelphia, commerce, 7 ; taken, 115 ; 
routes from to the West, 250 ; post 
from to the West, 410. 

Phillipeaux Island, 221. 

Pickering, Timothy, on the force neces- 
sary to gari'ison the frontier after the 
war, 236 ; planning a western State, 
244 ; on astronomical boundaries, 2()0 ; 
on the western movement, 261 ; and 
the rectangular surveys, 267 ; opposed 
to opening the lands to "lawless emi- 
grants," 270 ; and the St. Clair cam- 
])aign, 422 ; confers with Red Jacket, 
438 ; to treat with the Indians, 447. 

Pickett, Alabama, 189. 

Pierro. See Ponrr^, Captain. 

Pinckney, Thomas, goes to England, 
431 ; sent to Madrid, 548 ; negotia- 
tions at Madrid, 5.54 ; treaty signed, 
555. 

Piqua, 176. 

Pittman, Philip, on the Illinois Indians, 
27, 30. 

Pittsburg, laid out, 12. 328 ; view, 51 ; 
condition (1770), 52 ; Indians infest it, 
clamoring for support, (il ; longitude 
of. 65; meeting at, to sustain tin- 1 (ev- 
olution, 83 ; to be taken by Connolly, 
86; federal in syni])athy, 29(i ; boats 
passing, 298 ; condition, 304 ; trade at, 
444 ; map, 444, 445 ; its condition 



(179()), .506 ; roads to and from, 507-511 ; 
map of vicinity, 570. 

Pittsburg Gazette, 270, 3.50. 

Pittsylvania, proposed colony, 49. 

Piatt'. IMchai-d, 436. 

Point Pleasant, 112 ; battle, 73 ; position 
of, 291. 

Pollock, Oliver, his career, 108 ; to aid 
G. R. Clark, 117 ; sends money to 
Clark, 121, 143 ; becomes poor, 121 ; 
at New Orleans, 148 ; planning an 
attack on Pensaeola, 149 ; apijointed 
commercial agent, 1.50 ; complains of 
British dei^redations, 156 ; fitting out 
armed vessels, 157 ; warning Ameri- 
cans, 157 ; urging active measures, 
1.57; aims to capture Pensaeola, 158; 
extent of his claim on the United 
States, 158 ; joins Galvez in an attack 
on the English posts, 1()2 ; his ill luck, 
l(i3 ; sending supplies to Todd and 
Clark, 181 ; large indebtedness of 
Congress and Virginia to, 198 ; insists 
on the Americans securing a port of 
dejiosit in Spanish territory, 202 ; 
gives Congress a jiortrait of Galvez, 
222 ; leaves New Orleans, 336 ; impris- 
oned at Havana, 33(). 

Pond, Peter, and the Grand Portage, 
221 ; claims to have discovered an over- 
land passage to the Pacific, 389, 390 ; 
his map, 390, 391, 471 ; at Philadel- 
phia, 437. 

Pontiac, killed, 26. 

Pope, John, 518, 519. 

Portages, between the Ohio and Lake 
Erie, 248, 316 ; inade highways, 25(5, 
28(!. 

Porter, Captain, moves, 483, 

Postal service, in the West, 296. 

Posts on the Great Lakes, detention of 
by England, 229 ; pecuniary loss to 
the Americans by the detention, 2:)4 ; 
demanded by Congress, 234 ; their 
names, 234 ; new demand, 235 ; British 
gain by tlie detention, 2:')6, 241 ; their 
plans of detention, 2I>7 ; garrisons, 
240; New York demands the sur- 
render, 241 ; in a ruinous condition, 
276 ; insufficiently garrisoned, 276 ; to 
be retaken if the Americans captured 
them, 277 ; the English policy one of 
delay, 279 ; Washington reopens the 
question, ■Wit. 

Potier, P^re. i:!0. 

Potomac River, its importance, 11 ; 
portage to the Oliio, 50, 53 ; route to 
the West. 251, 2.52, 257. 

Pottawattamies, 26. 

Pourre (Pierro), Captain, 188. 

Powell's Valley, 21, 81 ; raided, 91. 

Power, Thomas, spy, 553, .567. 

Pownall, (iovernor, and the Oliio Com- 
pany, 47. 

Prairie du Chien. 220. 

Prescott, General Robert, 483. 

Presqu'Isle, to be occupied by Pennsyl- 
vania troops. 456. 

Priest, William, 479, .528. 



690 



INDEX. 



Printing-press, in Kentucky, 340. 

Privateers, 151. 

Proclamation of 17G3, and the treaty 
(178'2), 221, 222. 

Property line, 4, 14, 17 ; as run," 20 ; not 
approved, 20. 

Pulteney, Sir William, 474. 

Putnam, Rufus, exploring the lower 
Mississippi, 110 ; plans western houies 
for disbanded soldiers, 244 ; calls a 
meeting- of veterans, 280 ; forms the 
Ohio Company, 280 ; his record, 280 ; 
on the Muskingum valley, 200 ; leader 
of the Ohio Company enterprise, 298, 
304 ; abets Cutler's schemes, 311 ; 
and the Mississipjii question, 321 ; and 
the Gallipolis project, 404 ; proposes 
a line of posts in Ohio, 437 ; to serve 
under AVayne, 441 ; treats with the 
western Indians, 441 ; map of Ohio, 
490, 497 ; his land warrants, 498 ; !Sur- 
veyor-General, uOO. 

Quebec Bill, 2, 5 ; earlier purpose of 
extending to the Mississippi, 41 ; ac- 
count of, 03 ; its purpose to hem in the 
Americans, 70 ; passed, 71 ; views of 
it, 7"), 107 ; obscurely noticed in the 
Declaration of Independence, 75 ; 
Franklin virges its repeal, 70 ; Ver- 
gennes favors its bounds as permanent 
ones for the United States, 212. 

Rainy Lake, 215. 

Randall, Robert. 494. 

Randolph, Beverly, to treat with the 
Indians, 447. 

Randolph, Edmund, 227 ; on the Vii-- 
ginia laud cessions, 246 ; on the Mis- 
sissippi question, 319 ; relations with 
Fauchet, 4(53 ; opinions of the British 
government, 405 ; the Fauchet dis- 
patch, 479. 

Rayneval, Gerard de, 146; and the 
boundary question, 210 ; sent to 
London, 212 ; his object, 212 ; on the 
bounds of the United States, 218. 

Read, D. B., Life of Siriicoe, 448. 

Red Jacket in Philadelphia, 438 ; at the 
council of the Miami confederates, 442, 
443. 

Red Lake, 215. 

Red Stone, 14, 117. 

Red Stone Old Fort, 50, 254. 

Regulators, move West, 78. 

Religion, in the ordinance (1787), 289. 

Rhode Island, her financial vagaries, 
278 ; joins the Union, 375. 

Richmond, Duke of, 219. 

Rittenhouse, Dr., ()5. 

Rivers, navigation of, in international 
law, 184. 

Robertson, Colonel, 30. 

Robertson, James, with Boone. 46 ; at 
Watauga, 78 ; conducts its defense, 
91 ; moves to the Cumberland valley, 
143; settles Nashville, 179; leader of 
the Cumberland community, 180 ; re- 
pulses the Cherokees, 194 ; relations 



with Mir6, .334; attacks the Creeks, 
358; ready to join the Spanish plot, 
370 ; made brigadier-general, 376 ; ex- 
pects Cherokee raids, 520; wounded, 
521 ; in the Tennessee Convention, 559. 

Rocheblave, 156, 203 ; at Fort Gage, 113 ; 
at Kaskaskia, 118 ; sent to Virginia, 
120. 

Rodney, defeats De Grasse, 217. 

Rogers, David, killed, 140 ; on the Mis- 
sissippi, 155. 

Rogers, John, commands a galley, 133. 

Rogers, Major, at Mackinac, 24. 

Romans, Bernard, 106. 

Romayne, Dr., 568. 

Roosevelt, Nicholas T., 514. 

Royal proclamation (1763), 6, 7, 22 ; 
Washington's view of it, 11 ; annulled, 
1() ; not enforced, 21, 42, 60 ; must not 
be annulled, 41 ; its purpose, 44, 48. 

Rumsey, James, his discovery, 252, 321 ; 
controversy with Fitch, 325. 

Russell, William, America, 536. 

Rutherford, General, 93. 

Rutledge, Edward, on the Mississippi 
question, 318. 

Sacs and Foxes, 172 ; jironounce for the 
Americans, 177. 

St. Anthony, Falls of, 323. 

St. Clair, Arthur, president of Congress, 
282 ; interprets the slavery clause of 
the ordinance (1787), 288 ; and the 
Northwest Territory, 292 ; his career, 
305 ; governor of the Northwest, 305 ; 
seeks to extinguish the Indian title, 
306 ; prepares for an Indian war, 307 ; 
makes treaty with the Six Nations, 
309; on AVilliamson, 369 ; on the Ohio, 
402 ; and the Harmar camjiaign, 418 ; 
his own campaign, 422 ; his instruc- 
tions, 427 ; his defeat, 429 ; resigns, 
434 ; declares the Indian war at an 
end, 491 ; trying to thwart the French 
faction, 539 ; his fears, 541. 

St. Francis River, 29. 

St. Joseph, attacked by Spanish, 189. 

St. Lawrence River, its ultimate source 
unknown, 101 ; navigation of it denied 
to the Americans, 218. 

St. Legei-, 112 ; in Quebec, 241. 

St. Louis, settled, 23 ; population, 23 ; 
Spanish plots, 113 ; threatened by Sin- 
clair, 171 ; described, 171 ; plan, 172, 
173 ; Collot's opinion of, .563. 

St. Paul, city. Carver's deed, 103. 

St. Peter River, 104. 

St. Pierre Island, 1. 

Ste. Genevieve, 23. 

San Ildefonso, treaty, 572. 

San Lorenzo, treaty, 555. 

Sandusky, outpost of Detroit, 112. 

Santa F^, mines accessible to attack, .563. 

Sargent, Charles S., 537. 

Sargent, Winthrop, 292 ; adjutant of St. 
Clair, 428 ; in the Mississippi Territory, 
.573. _ 

Savigrain, 299. 

Savannah, evacuated, 203. 



INDEX. 



591 



Scioto Company, 402 ; its agent Joel 
Barlow, oil ; and Duer's failure, 
435. 

Scioto River, map, 67 ; Indians on, 302. 

Scotch, in Kentucky, 52! ». 

Scotch-Irish, character, 12 ; arriving on 
the l^elaware, 52 ; in Ohio, 304 ; in the 
Northwest, 500. 

Scott, (Tciieral Charles, map of his raid 
across tile Oliio, 249; his attack on the 
Wabash tribes, 422. 

Scott, Joseph, tfnited States Gazetteer, 
495, 505. 

St'raggins, Henry, 44. 

SculFs map of Pennsylvania, 53. 

Seagrave, James, 521. 

Sebastian, Judge, traitor, oOS ; iiensioned 
by Spain, 3cS.S ; and Carondelet, 552; 
goes with Gayoso to New Orleans, 554 ; 
his infamy rewarded, 550. 

Seeley, Expansion of England, 5. 

Senecas, 139. 

Sequoyah, 78. 

Seven Ranges, the, 2(j7, 311, 313. 

Sevier, John, in the Watauga settlement, 
80 ; holding the Cherokees in check, 
.96 ; at King's Mountain, 181 ; at con- 
vention of .Jonesboro', 335 ; governor 
of the Franklin region, 341 ; his down- 
fall, 3()0 ; arrest and escape, 360 ; made 
brigadier-general, 376 ; goes to Georgia, 
515 ; attacks the Creeks, 544. 

Sharp, Grenville, 154. 

Shawnees, claim the Ohio country against 
the Iroquois, 14 ; aroused, 58 ; their 
warpath, 67 ; hostile, 124 ; on Bird's 
raid, 175 ; in treaty, 272 ; attacked by 
Kentuckians, 276 ; marauding, 310 ; 
their uncertain friendship, 345, 

Shays's rebellion, 274, 278, 344. 

ShealtV'. Lieutenant, 474. 

Sheffield, Lord, 277. 

Shelby, Evan, in the Watauga settle- 
ment, 80 ; attacks the Indians, 1M6, 
139 ; at King's Mountain, 181 ; and the 
State of Franklin, 354. 

Shelby, Isaac, governor of Kentucky, 
52() ; fails to thwart the Fi'ench fac- 
tion, 540. 

Shelburne, Lord, orders the property 
line to be run, 14 ; and the peace (1782), 
212, 213, 21(J, 222, 227. 

Shepherd, Colonel David, 114, 192. 

Simcoe, John Graves, 42(5, 44(), 447 ; his 
distrust of the Americans, 448 ; his 
hostile pur])ose, 451 ; builds fort at the 
Maumee rapids, 455 ; apprehensive of 
Wayne's success, 457 ; disturbed at it, 
460, 4()1, 488 ; sends expedition to So- 
dus Bay, 474 ; his passionate chagrin, 
483. 

Sinclair, at Mackinac, 142 ; to descend 
the Mississippi, 142, 171. 

Sioux Indians, 30, 104 ; sought by Sin- 
clair, 171. 

Sioux (•oiintry, 215. 

Six Nations. See Iroquois. 

Slaughter at the falls of the Ohio, litl. 

Slavery, Jefferson's purpose for the West, 



258 ; and the oi-dinanee (1787), 283, 
287 ; and the phrase " all men are 
born free and equal," 287; among the 
French in Illinois, 288 ; early move- 
ments for abolishing it, 288 ; Cutler's 
futile attenq^t to abolish it, 289. 

Slaves, trouble arising from their depor- 
tation from New York at the evacua- 
tion, 231. 

Smith, Charles, 83. 

Smith, General Robert, 370. 

Smith, James, on the Cumberland River, 
44. 

Smith, Provost, 65. 

Smith, William, 484. 

Smyth, IVavels, 8() ; movements with 
Connolly, 87. 

Smythe, Colonel, 174. 

Sodus Bay, 474. 

Soldiers' certificates, depreciated, 282. 

South Carolina, bounds, 10 ; cession of 
western lands, 358. 

South Carolina Company, 377. 

Southern tribes, the question of bounds, 
10 ; distrust the English, 38 ; played 
upon by both English and Americans, 
89. 

Spain, holds Louisiana, 106 ; plots at Sb. 
Louis, 113 ; joins France in planning 
disaster to the Americans, 147 ; hesi- 
tating, 152 ; offers to mediate,. 154 ; hor 
position on the Mississippi, 157 ; her 
navy, 158 ; to have Florida, 159 ; urges 
Congress to accept a long truce, 159 ; 
threatens alliance with England, 160 ; 
ambitious, 1(50 ; must have Gibraltar, 
160; treaty (1779) with France 160 ; de- 
clares Avar with England, 161, 564 ; in- 
sists with Jay upon the control of the 
Mississippi, 182 ; using France to this 
end, 182 ; sends expedition to place the 
Spani.sh flag east of the Mississippi, 
188, 212 ; aims to secure the eastern 
bank of the Mississippi, 212; deni.s 
English right to navigate the Missis- 
sippi, 21(J ; gains Florida (1782), 222 ; 
contends it carried her territory to the 
Yazoo, 222 ; explores on the Pacific 
coast, 238; her intrigues in Ki'iitu<'k>, 
309; her claims for the Mississippi, 
318 ; her covert action, 327 ; views on 
American independence, 327 ; enmity 
towards the United States,_330 ; invites 
settlers west of the Mississippi, 366 ; 
her diplomacy, 388 ; her perfidious 
l)olicy, 55() ; delays execution of the 
San Lorenzo treaty, 5()5. 

Sparks, Jared, on Vergennes, 223. 

Springfield (O.), 176. 

Stamp Act, 2. 

Standf()rd(Ky.), 111. 

Stanhoije, Earl. 512. 

Starved Rock, 2(i. 

State debts, assumption of, 408. 

Steamboats, 512 ; on the western rivers, 
317, 318, 320, 323, 414. 

Steuben, Baron, confronting Arnold, 19<); 
sent to demand posts, 234. 

Stevens, B. F., Facsimiles, 145, 223. 



592 



INDEX. 



Stobo, Captain, 60. 

Stockbridge Indians, 87, 126. 

Stormont, Lord, in Paris, 151, 153, 154. 

8tover, Michael, 44. 

Straehey, in Paris, 218, 219. 

Straits of Juan de la Fuca, 238. 

Stuart, John, agent among the southern 

Indians, !•, 88. 
Suffolk, Lord, and the use of Indians in 

war, 127. 
Sugar cane, in Louisiana, .5.51. 
Sullivan, General, 9 ; campaign against 

the Iroquois, 138. 
Sullivan. -John, 347. 
Swiss, on tlie Great Scioto, 500. 
Sydney, instructs Haldimand to hold 

the posts, 241 ; and the Indian war, 

276. 
Synimes, J. C, at Marietta, 306 ; in the 

Miami country, 314 ; his land warrants, 

498. 

Talleyrand, 223. 

Taylor, Hancock, 59. 

Tennessee, first white child born in, 77 ; 
population (1776), 91; invaded by In- 
dian allit's of the British, 91 ; its set- 
tlements, 95 ; constitutional beginnings 
of the State, 335, 336 ; maps of, 516, 
517, 544, 545 ; the question of State- 
hood, 552 ; population (1795), 552 ; con- 
vention to make a State, 559. 

Tennessee Company, 377 ; seeks to settle 
in Georgia, 515. 

Tennessee River, settlement at the great 
bend of, 335. See Cherokee River. 

Thomas, Isaac, 93. 

Thomas, Lieutenant John, 30. 

Thompson, Captain Andrew, 194. 

Thompson, Captain William, 5S. 

Thomi)son, David, his survey of the Mis- 
sissi])i)i, 472. 

Thomson, Charles, 250. 

Thuilow, 71. 

Tilghman, James, 66. 

Toby's Creek, 2,50. 

Todd, Cajitain John, governor of Illinois, 
122 ; in Kentucky, 177. 

Todd, David, ;i:!l. 

Todd & Co., 416. 

Toledo (0.), 264. 

Tomahawk claims, 49. 

Tonicas, 29. 

Tories from New England, on the Mis- 
sissippi, 110; at Natchez, 156. 

Tonhnin. Henry, Description of Ken- 
tuchi. .529. 

Transylvania set up, 82,; movement to- 
wards its settlement, 97 ; its proprie- 
tors recompensed, 98. 

Treaties : 

Augusta (Ga.), (1773), 88. 
Augusta (Ga.), (1783), 327. 
Foutainebleau (178.5), 184. 
Fort Finney (1785), 272. 
Fort Harmar (1789), 293, 310. 
Fort Mcintosh (1785), 2(58. 
Fort Stanwix (17«)8), 16. 43, 268. 
Fort Stanwix (1784), 267, 310. 



France and Spain (1779), 160. 

Hardlabor (1768), 55. 

Holston, 375. 

Hopewell, 343, 344, 375. 

Jay's (1794), 3, 465-467. 

Lancaster, 166. 

Lochaber (S. C.) (1768), 55, 78. 

Paris (1763), 1, 2, 22, 63, 107. 

Paris, secret (1763), 29. 

Paris (1782), 2, 205 ; history of, 208 ; 
made definitive, 223 ; infractions of, 
228, 240 ; ratification of the defini- 
tive treaty, 235 ; shoiUd acts date 
from the provisional or the defini- 
tive treaty ? 2.36. 

Ryswick (1697), 1. 

San Ildefonso, 572. 

San Lorenzo (1795), 3, 555. 

Sycamore Shoals (1775), 82. 

Westphalia (1648), 184. 

White's Fort. .516. 
Trent, "William, 19. 
Trevett v. Weedon, 344. 
Trial by jury, 290. 
Trnman, Captain Alexander, 441. 
Trumbull, Colonel John, 572. 
Trumbull, Jonathan, governor of Con- 
necticut, 264. 
Tryon, governor of North Carolina, 10, 

77 ; and the Cherokees, 10 ; and Tran- 
sylvania, 84. 
Tugaloo River, 92. 327. 
Turgot, 146. 
Tuscarawas River, 125. 
Tuscarawas valley, 56. 
Tup]5er, General Benjamin, surveying in 

the Ohio country, 267, 280; confers with 

Rufus Putnam, 280. 
Twightwees, 16. 

Ulloa, Antonio de, in New Orleans, 33. 

United States, population (1780), 182 ; ter- 
ritory secured (1782), 209 ; no cause of 
gratitude to France or Spain, 223 ; cost 
of the Revolvitionary War, 225 ; dan- 
gers after the peace, 227 ; army neces- 
sary, 236 ; the office of Geographer of, 
2()() ; first recognized by the western 
Indians, 267, 273 ; expenditures on the 
Indian problem, 26S ; Indian Bureau, 
274 ; depai'tments, 274 ; stories of dis- 
integration, 277 ; Hamilton supposed 
to be the leader of a monarchical 
party, 277 ; federal convention, 282, 
284 ; the Constitution and the Missis- 
sippi qiiestion, 320 ; population (1787), 
351 ; population (1790), 398 ; valuation 
(1790), 398 ; British views of western 
bounds, 432, 470 ; her bound completed, 
573 ; character of her people, 574. 

Unzaga, at New Orleans, 148. 

Upi>er Canada, created, 426. 

Van Braam's claim, 60. 
Vancouver, in the Pacific, 533. 
Vandalia, 248 : colony, 57 ; grant, 169, 

200, 20(i. 
Varnum, General J. M., at Marietta, 305, 

306. 



INDEX. 



593 



Vaiighan, Benjamin, sent to England 
by Jay, 21G ; on the treaty (1782), 
227. 

V^reiiclrye, 104. 

Vergreinie.s, his pohcy, 2, 4 : his charac- 
ter, 144 ; jjlans to intervene in the 
American war, 145 ; his insincerity, 
145 ; urges grant of money to Amer- 
ica, 14(j ; refnses guns, 151 ; inHuen- 
eing the king, 152 ; ready for an Amer- 
ican alhance, 153 ; seeks to join fcipaiu 
in it, 155, 158 ; his purpose, 15S ; 
scliciiies to disunite the States, 164 ; 
oil'ended by John Adams, 184 ; his 
measures produce a revulsion, 208 ; 
defied by the peace commissioners. 
201) ; hoped to play into the hands of 
England, 213 ; on tlie bounds fixed by 
the treaty (1782), 218 : desired oidy 
the independence of the United States, 
not their prosperity, 223. 

Vermont, chiims for admission to the 
Union, 205 ; British intrigue with, 
238 ; as a possible new State, 362 ; ad- 
mitted to the Union, 515. 

Vigo, Francois, joins Clark, 120; impov- 
erished by aiding Clark, 121 ; cap- 
tui-ed by Hamilton's scouts, 133 ; in- 
foi'ius Clark of Hamilton's condition, 
133 ; his claim on Virginia, 247 ; a fur 
trader, 416. 

Vincennes, French in the neighborhood, 
28, 38 ; change to English law, 40 ; 
lauds of the French threatened by the 
Quebec Bill, 69 ; the French warned 
to remove from, 69 ; stockaded, 113 ; 
occupied by Helm, 120 ; captured by 
Hamilton. 131 ; captured by Clark, 
13.3, 135 ; Helm in command, 1.35 ; dis- 
content at, 275 ; population, 275 ; Ilar- 
mar at, 296. 

\'irginia, tide-water people and over-hill 
people, 1 1 ; valley of, 12 ; Scotch- 
Irish, 12 ; claims the " Indiana " 
country, 19 ; her territoiy curtailed by 
the Fort Stanwix treaty, 20 ; her west- 
ern claims ignoi'ed by the AValpole 
gi'ant, 50 ; espouses the Cherokee 
claims against the Ii'ociuois, 50 ; dis- 
pute with Pennsylvania over bounds, 
52, 177, 19() ; curved western bounds 
of Pennsylvania shown in map, 54 ; 
Franklin disputes her western claims, 
55; Georges Mason defends them, 5.5; 
lier charter claims, 63 ; the Quebec 
Bill, <)5 ; I )unmore. governor, ()5 ; hold- 
ing the Oliio. 84; frontier to he. at- 
tacked from the south, 88 ; defines her 
territorial rights, 98 ; rejects private 
purchases of land, 98 ; sets up Ken- 
tucky as a county, 98 ; sends G. R. 
Clark west, 117 ; encourages him, 1.32; 
gives him thanks. 132 ; opposes the 
Spanish demands. Kil ; her territorial 
claims, 166 ; adopts (jonstitution. I(i7 ; 
sets up civil government in Illinois, 
1()9 ; .sets up land ortice, 169 ; extends 
her southern boundary to the Missis- 
sippi, 174 ; warning New England, 



185 ; her proposed cession of land north 
of the Ohio, 185 ; her territorial claims 
attacked by Tom Paine, 18(j ; map of 
bounds, 197 ; offers a cession, 198 ; im- 
pedes siction, 199 ; weakening on the 
Mississippi question, 200 ; jealous of 
the Vermont claims for Statehood, 
205 ; validity of her territorial claim, 
206 ; language of her charter as to 
bounds, 206 ; the i^rincipal offender in 
infractions of the treaty (1782), 231, 
232 ; treatment of the British debts, 
232 ; George Mason on her charter, 
245 ; incensed at Tom Paine, 246 ; ces- 
sion of her western lands jjroposed, 
246 ; makes a cession, 247 ; cost of 
her conquest of the Northwest, 247 ; 
bounty-lands, 247 ; her election, 247 ; 
use of her rivers as routes to the west, 
248 ; routes to Kentucky, map, 249 ; 
eager for an Indian war, 274 ; and the 
Mississippi question, 320 ; and the 
new Constitution, .361. 

Virginia Company, 277. 

Voight, 324. 

AV abash Company, 200, .3(i5. 

Wabash River, 39 ; described, 40. 

Wabash tribes, 345. 

Wabasha, 171. 

Walker, Dr. (Colonel) Thomas, 15, 16, 
174; his grant in Kentuckj-, 21. 

Walpole, Thomas, and western lands, 
47. See Ohio ('ompany (Walpole's). 

Washington, interest in westei'u lands, 
43, 54 ; sends Crawford west, 43, 50 ; 
of the Mississippi Company, 46 ; the 
Dinwiddie grants, 47, 50, .53 ; goes 
west (1770), 50; at Fort Pitt, 52; on 
the Kanawha, 52 ; buying soldiers' 
claims, 53 ; his western lands occupied 
by others, 57 ; Dunmore's alleged 
grants, 58 ; his land surveyed and ad- 
vertised, 58, ,59 ; his caution, 59; land 
surveyed for him by Bullitt, 59 ; buys 
other claims, 60 ; planning to peoi)le 
his lands with emigrants, 61 ; at Val- 
ley Forge, 124; to sanction use of In- 
dians, 127 ; i-estrains Brodhead, 140 ; 
defeated on Long Island, 147 ; at 
Brandy wine, 1.52 ; disapproves Lafay- 
ette's plan for invading Canada, 1.59; 
interview with Luzerne, 164 ; distrusts 
the Confederation, 188 ; appealed to by 
Clark and Brodhead, 192; at York- 
town, 195 ; sends Irvine to Fort Pitt, 
196; favors western homes for the 
disbanded army, 244, 245 ; would lay 
out two States, 245 ; on the Virginia 
water-ways. 248 ; on western routes, 
25(t, 256 ; their necessity in holding the 
west, 2.50 ; on the Mohawk route, 251 ; 
his western lands, 251 ; on the Poto- 
mac route, 251 ; on Rumsey's mechani- 
cal boat, 2.52 ; his map of tlie Potomac 
divide, 2.52, 251! ; entertains commis- 
sionei-s at Mount Vernon, 2.56 ; on Lake 
Erie i)ortage, 256 ; on the Mississippi 
question, 256 ; President of the James 



594 



INDEX. 



River and Potomac Canal Company, 

257 ; objects to the ordinance (17.S4), 
260; favors "progressive seating" in 
the west, 260 ; relations with Runisey, 
325 ; favors the independence of Ken- 
tucky, 331 ; receives dedication of Fil- 
son's map, 332 ; views on tlie Spanish 
question, 338. 370 ; and the St. Clair 
campaign, 422 ; criticises Ruf us Put- 
nam's plan for a line of posts, 437 ; his 
anxiety to maintain peace with Eng- 
land, 4()3 ; considciinL; the Jay treaty, 
477 ; treatment of tlie wliiskey rioters, 
486 ; sympathizes with Hamilton in the 
French question, 532 ; congratulated 
on his birthday, 558 ; warns western 
intriguers, 5()3. 

Washington, city of, how its site was 
determined, 409. 

Watauga Association, 3.34 ; formed, 70 ; 
buys its land, 82. 

Watauga River, 77 ; early settlers, 44, 
4(5. 

Watauga settlement, 78 ; becomes Wash- 
ington County, 'SO ; warned by Stuart, 
91 ; attacked, 91 ; to be annexed to. 
North Carolina, 95 ; loyalists expelled, 
97 ; sending out raiding parties, 122 ; 
sends out Shelby, 136 ; population, 
341. 

Waterford (0.), 421. 

Wayne, Anthony, suggested as com- 
mander at the West, 439 ; gathering liis 
forces, 451 ; his cavalry, 452 ; his ad- 
vance, 457; his victory, 458; treating 
with the tribes, 461 ; dies, 483 ; his 
final i)acification of the tribes, 487 ; 
foruialif its of his treaty, 488 ; the line 
e.stal)lislipd, 490; cost of the war, 494; 
small reservations, 496. 

Wedderburn, 70. 

West, rival routes to, 248, 316, 317; 
movements to set up States, 257 ; im- 
migration to, 270, 296, 298, 302 ; at- 
tractions advertised, 280 ; demands 
slavery, 288; postal service, 296; 
character of its people, 387 ; routes 
thither, 508, 511. _ 

West Florida, limits, 110 ; population, 
110. See Florida. 

West Sylvania, 96, 

Western lands, diverse views of Vir- 
ginia and Maryland respecting them, 
168 ; treasury warrants, 17.S ; occupants 
seek to make a State, 179 ; New York's 
claim, 185 ; cessions of, ISO ; public do- 
main in, 186, 20S ; the Eastern States 
show their rights, 199 ; expected to 
pay the expenses of the war, 206 : 
France would give them to Spain, 209 ; 
Congress establishes its sovereignty 
over them, 246 ; reserved for soldiers' 
bounties, 247, 261 ; surveys advocated 
by Jefferson, 2(il ; eagerness for new 
States, 2()2 ; land office, 262; rectangu- 
lar survey, 266 ; becoming productive, 
296. 

Western ports, arrangements for evacvi- 
ating, 482. 



Western Reserve, 264, 500; its extent, 

2(;5. 

Western Reserve Historical Society, 
Tracts, 255. 

Westward emigration and the Indians, 
329. 

Weymouth, Lord, 154. 

Wharton, Francis, Internationul Law 
Digest, 217. 

Wharton, Samuel, 19 ; on the Kana- 
wha, 252 ; in the Muskingum country, 
299. 

Wheeling, 56, 68, 510 ; attacked, 194. 

Wheeling Creek, attack, 114. 

Wliipple, Commodore, 280. 

Whiskey rebellion, 485. 

White, l)r. James, Indian agent, 345. 

White, James, 35cS. 

White Bear Lake, 214, 215. 

White Eyes (Indian), 177, 293. 

WJiiteley, Colonel, 568. 

White's Fort, treaty, 516. 

Whitney, Eli, cotton-gin, 551. 

Wliitw<nth, Rieliard, 106. 

Wildtrnt'ss Road, 99, 328 ; opened by 
Boone, .S2. 

Wilkinson, James, map of his raid across ' 
the Ohio, 249; liis character, 3119; his 
plots, 349, 35^1 ; confers with Gayoso, 
355 ; seeks to reach Miro, 355 ; at 
Frankfort, 35(i ; commercial plans 
with Miro, 35(i ; again in Kentucky, 
3,").S ; traitorous conduct, 363, 3()9 ; 
interview with Connolly, 368 ; in the 
Kentucky Convention, 369 ; seeks land 
in the Yazf)o, 369 ; representations to 
Miro, 370 ; despondent under defeat, 
374, 3.S8 ; joins O'FaUon, 378 ; his 
fiendish advice, .■>79 ; attacks the 
Wabash tribes, 427 ; aroused at St. 
Clair's defeat, 430 ; bi'igadier under 
Wayne, 440 ; estimated by Wasliing- 
ton, 444 ; succeeds Wayne, 483 ; his 
intercourse with Carondelet, 553 ; I'e- 
ceives money from Carondelet, 557 ; 
and the French faction, 561 ; saves 
Power, .567 ; at Natchez, 573. 

Willet, Colonel, sent to McGillivray, 
3S5 ; declines to serve under Wayne, 
440. 

Williamson, Colonel Andrew, 474 ; his 
campaign against the Cherokees, with 
map, 94, 95. 

Williamson, David, 204. -v^^ 

Willing, Captain James, on the Missis- ,j 
sippi, 129, 156, 157. -^ 

Will's Creek, 254. 

Win neb; I goes. 26, .39. 

Wistonsin River, 39; portage, 39. 

Witt, Simeon de, 2()4. 

Wolcott, Oliver, 268 ; on the Gallipolis 
scheme, 405 ; and the whiskey riots, 
485. 

Wood Creek, 251. 

Wood Creek portage, 15, 19. 

Wood Creek route, 501. 

Wood, Colonel, 112. 

Wood, James, 85. 

Writ of habeas corpus, 290, 



INDEX. 



595 



Writs of assistance, 4. 

Wyaudots, uusteady, 124, 132 ; prowl- 
ing, lo8 ; alarmed, 192. 

Wyime, General History of the British 
Empire in America^ 42, 101. 

Wythe, George, sympathy for Kentucky, 
116. 

Yadkin River, 77. 

Yazoo grants, 549 ; corruption in the 

Georgia legislature respecting them, 

549 ; act rescinded, 5UU. 



Yoder, Jacob, '-'04, o2:5 ; his voyage on 

the Mississippi, o2(J. 
Youghiogheuy River, 250, 254. 
Yorktown, capitulation at, 188, 19t3. 
Yrujo, 570. 

Zane family, 5ti, (JS, 204, 511. 

Zeisberger, and the Moravians in Pennsyl- 
vania, 5(j ; restrains western Indians, 
87, 112 ; warns (iibson, 138 ; warns 
Fort Henry, 194; and the St. Clair 
campaign, 424. 



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